Switching to make decisions

We have seen the vast and virtually limitless possibilities of combining the Java operators with if and else statements. But sometimes, a decision in Java can be made better in other ways.

When we must decide based on a clear list of possibilities that don't involve complex combinations, then switch is usually the way to go.

We start a switch decision like this:

switch(argument){
}

In the previous example, an argument could be an expression or a variable. Within the curly braces, {}, we can make decisions based on the argument with the case and break elements:

case x:
     // code to for case x
     break;
case y:
     // code for case y
     break;

In the previous example, you can see that each case states a possible result and that each break denotes the end of that case, as well as the point at which no further case statements will...