Why does Try-Catch require curly braces

Question

Just curious: Why is the syntax for try catch in C# (Java also?) hard coded for multiple statements? Why doesn\'t the language allow:

int i;
string s = DateT         


        

Answer 1

The first think I can think of is that the curly braces create a block with its own variable scope.

Look at the following code

try
{
    int foo = 2;
}
catch (Exception)
{
    Console.WriteLine(foo); // The name 'foo' does not exist in the current context
}

foo is not accessible in the catch block due to the variable scoping. I think this makes it easier to reason about whether an variable has been initialized before use or not.

Compare with this code

int foo;
try
{
    foo = 2;
}
catch (Exception)
{
    Console.WriteLine(foo); // Use of unassigned local variable 'foo'
}

here you can not guarantee that foo is initialized.