Is it a good idea to define a variable in a local block for a case of a switch statement?
- by Paperflyer
I have a rather long switch-case statement. Some of the cases are really short and trivial. A few are longer and need some variables that are never used anywhere else, like this:
switch (action) {
case kSimpleAction:
// Do something simple
break;
case kComplexAction: {
int specialVariable = 5;
// Do something complex with specialVariable
} break;
}
The alternative would be to declare that variable before going into the switch like this:
int specialVariable = 5;
switch (action) {
case kSimpleAction:
// Do something simple
break;
case kComplexAction:
// Do something complex with specialVariable
break;
}
This can get rather confusing since it is not clear to which case the variable belongs and it uses some unnecessary memory.
However, I have never seen this usage anywhere else.
Do you think it is a good idea to declare variables locally in a block for a single case?
