Can switch() be given more capability ?

[Rahul Sudip Bose]

It can only handle ints, chars...and enums. Why cant they make it take strings as well ?

[Mohamed Sanaulla]

Java 7 has an update for that- Project Coin

[Edit: Added the Links]

[Henry Wong]

Rahul Sudip Bose wrote:It can only handle ints, chars...and enums. Why cant they make it take strings as well ?

I believe this is an enhancement for Java 7.

[EDIT: beaten to the answer again]

Henry

[Rahul Sudip Bose]

I just started making my own class PowerSwitch{} for fun- please tell me if i am thinking in the right direction. (its just in the planning phase)
this will take strings, convert them to lowercase and use them as keys in a map. these keys will be mapped to int objects which will be used in the switch of this class.

Any suggestions , ideas etc welcome.

PS : i was wondering if i should leave this since others are already doing it and...well there is scjp

[Rahul Sudip Bose]

Henry Wong wrote:

Rahul Sudip Bose wrote:
[EDIT: beaten to the answer again]

i am not so sure what this means.

[Mohamed Sanaulla]

You can always map the int with some string values, use the int for switch and then retrieve the string based on the int value.

[Mohamed Sanaulla]

Rahul Sudip Bose wrote:

Henry Wong wrote:
[EDIT: beaten to the answer again]

i am not so sure what this means.

that means- there a difference of less than a minute between my and Henry's answer.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Rahul Sudip Bose wrote:It can only handle ints, chars...and enums. Why cant they make it take strings as well ?

. . . or anything which can be implicitly cast to an int, ie shorts and bytes.