Why can't I use switch statement on a String?

Question

Is this functionality going to be put into a later Java version?

Can someone explain why I can\'t do this, as in, the technical way Java\'s switch state

Answer 1

Other answers have said this was added in Java 7 and given workarounds for earlier versions. This answer tries to answer the "why"

Java was a reaction to the over-complexities of C++. It was designed to be a simple clean language.

String got a little bit of special case handling in the language but it seems clear to me that the designers were trying to keep the amount of special casing and syntactic sugar to a minimum.

switching on strings is fairly complex under the hood since strings are not simple primitive types. It was not a common feature at the time Java was designed and doesn't really fit in well with the minimalist design. Especially as they had decided not to special case == for strings, it would be (and is) a bit strange for case to work where == doesn't.

Between 1.0 and 1.4 the language itself stayed pretty much the same. Most of the enhancements to Java were on the library side.

That all changed with Java 5, the language was substantially extended. Further extensions followed in versions 7 and 8. I expect that this change of attitude was driven by the rise of C#