10.2.1 Notes for the C programmer

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 (); …