(octave.info)Notes for the C Programmer

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10.2.1 Notes for the C Programmer
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The ‘switch’ statement is also available in the widely used C
programming language.  There are, however, some differences between the
statement in Octave and C

   • Cases are exclusive, so they don’t ‘fall through’ as do the cases
     in the ‘switch’ statement of the C language.

   • The COMMAND_LIST elements are not optional.  Making the list
     optional would have meant requiring a separator between the label
     and the command list.  Otherwise, things like

          switch (foo)
            case (1) -2
            ...

     would produce surprising results, as would

          switch (foo)
            case (1)
            case (2)
              doit ();
            ...

     particularly for C programmers.  If ‘doit()’ should be executed if
     FOO is either ‘1’ or ‘2’, the above code should be written with a
     cell array like this

          switch (foo)
            case { 1, 2 }
              doit ();
            ...