Question

i saw this code somewhere

 switch(greet){
  case HELLO:
      System.out.println("Formal Greeting");
      break;
  case HI:
      System.out.println("Friendly Greeting");
      break;
  case YO:
      System.out.println("Informal Greeting");
      break;
  default:
      System.out.println("Person did not greet");
 }

It did not mention the type of datatype of the greet variable against which the cases are being checked.. but it’s east to figure out that it’s neither a byte,nor is it a Short or Int So logically the last permissible data type left for the switch block to accept as a variable is the char data type but i believe that char only takes single values like ‘c’ or ‘3’ ..so how do such big values like hello get evaluated? what is the possible explanation?

Answer 1

My best guess is that this is an Enum, and hello is an enum constant declared on the Enum.
So basically what we have here is:

public enum greet {
     hello,
     hi,
     yo;
}

Enum docs