Question

Why is it that curly braces do not define a separate local scope in Java? I was expecting this to be a feature common to the main curly brace languages (C, C++, Java, C#).

class LocalScopeTester
{
    public static void main(String... args)
    {
        Dog mine = new Dog("fido");
        if (mine.getName().equals("ace"))
        {
            Dog mine = new Dog("spot"); // error: duplicate local
        }
        else
        {
            Dog mine = new Dog("barkley"); // error: duplicate local
            {
                Dog mine = new Dog("boy"); // error: duplicate local
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

They do define a separate local scope, but you still cannot mask local variables from a parent scope (but you can of course mask instance variables).

But you can define new variables (with different names) and their scope will be limited to within the braces.