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18 views2 pages

Lec12 13

Uploaded by

vamsi.d124
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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ESC101 : Fundamental of computing

Lecture 12+13 (25 and 27 August, 2008)

In lecture 12 and 13, we covered the following topics.

• Revision of type casting and expression evaluation

• Program for representing integers in binary form.

• Program for representing fractions in binary form.

• Storage and representation of integer data types and floating point data types. (this topic was
covered to provide some more insight into the numeric data types and is not part of the course).

• switch statement

Although I had provided all the details of the lecture 12 and 13 on black board, some students feel
that the concept of switch statement is not clear to them. So I am providing the syntax and rules of
execution of switch statement. I am also providing an example of switch statement below.
The switch statement is used as a compact alternative for those problems which involve many cases.
The example at the end will make this point clear.
Syntax of switch statement :
The switch statement has the following syntax.

switch(expression)
{
case constant1 : statements;
break;
case constant2 : statements;
break;
•
•
•
case constantk : statements;
break;
default : statements;
break;
}
Here expression can be an expression of type byte, short, int, or char only; no other type of expression
is permitted. Each of constant1,constant2,· · ·, constantk must be literals (constant) of same type as the
type of expression. Moreover, no two literals can be of same value.

Execution of switch statement :


First the expression is evaluated, and let val be its value. Then val is successively tested against the value
of the constants constant1,constant2,· · ·, constantk. When a match is found, that is, constanti happens
to be same as val, then the statements associated with the ith case is executed. If no match is found,
then the statements associated with the default case are executed. The statement break serves the
following purpose. When this statement is encountered within the statement sequence of a case, the
break statement causes the program counter (instruction pointer) to jump to the next statement outside
the switch statement.

Example of switch statement :

Suppose we want to write a program which will do the following. There is a variable month of type
int. It has been assigned some value. We would like to print the name of the month corresponding to the

1
value of variable month. That is, if month = 1, program should print January, if month = 2, program
should print February, and so on. However, if month does not have a valid value (it is less than 1 or
greater than 12), the program should print Invalid month. We can do this task using a sequence of if
statements. But the same can be done in a more compact manner as follows.

int month;
// month is assigned some integer value.
switch(month)
{
case 1 : System.out.println(‘‘January’’);
break;
case 2 : System.out.println(‘‘February’’);
break;
case 3 : System.out.println(‘‘March’’);
break;
case 4 : System.out.println(‘‘April’’);
break;
case 5 : System.out.println(‘‘May’’);
break;
case 6 : System.out.println(‘‘June’’);
break;
case 7 : System.out.println(‘‘July’’);
break;
case 8 : System.out.println(‘‘August’’);
break;
case 9 : System.out.println(‘‘September’’);
break;
case 10 : System.out.println(‘‘October’’);
break;
case 11 : System.out.println(‘‘November’’);
break;
case 12 : System.out.println(‘‘December’’);
break;
default : System.out.println(‘‘Invalid month’’);
}

Let us consider the situation when month has value 9, then based on the execution rules mentioned above,
the output will be

September

Please note that in the above example there is only one statement for each case (excluding the break
statement). However,in general it is permitted to have multiple statements for a case. Also note that
mentioning default case in a switch statement is optional. If we don’t mention default case, and there
is no match of the expression value with any of the constants of the cases, then no statement will be
executed in the switch.

Remark : A student had asked whether it is permitted to place int i = 4; in expression of a switch ?
The answer is NO. This is because int i = 4; is a statement and not an expression.

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