Question

I am porting some code from C to C++ and I found this code:

if(ErrorCode >= SOME_CONSTANT)
{
    Status = RETVAL_OK;

    switch ( ErrorCode )
    {
        default:
            Status = RETVAL_FAILED;
            break;
    }
}

This code generates a compilation warning:

warning C4065: switch statement contains 'default' but no 'case' labels

The question: Is there any purpose of the switch statement (that I failed to grasp) or is it simply crufty code?

That is, is there any reason (when compiling for ANSI C or C++) to not write it like this?

if(ErrorCode >= SOME_CONSTANT)
     Status = RETVAL_FAILED;

EDIT: To address all the questions that appeared:

The code was not meant to be expanded: It was the final release of a module that was delivered four years ago (it hasn’t been touched since then, so I am inclined to believe it’s cruft).

There were also no removed case statements as far as I could see (the same code construct was placed in three different places in code (the same switch/default inside an if checking on the error constant). If there were removed case statements, the code should have been refactored anyway when the cases were removed.

Thanks everyone.

Answer 1

Two things I can think of: 1) the code was automatically generated 2) the original coder thought they might add different processing for error codes later, but never did.
In either case, I can’t see any reason not to change it to a simple if statement