Today we wanted to write some code in java that performs some or the other action depending on a condition. At the same time if some action fails we wanted to fall back to the other action.

We've written it like this:

switch(boolean_expression)
{
  case true:
  {
    try
    {
      // Some actions.
      break;
    }
    catch(Exception e)
    {
      // Fall back to false route. 
    }
  }
  case false:
  {
    // Other actions.
    break;
  }
}

The fun part is that it's not valid java code.

Why?

The answer can be found in spec: 14.11. The switch Statement

The type of the Expression must be char, byte, short, int, Character, Byte, Short, Integer, String, or an enum type (§8.9), or a compile-time error occurs.

But why?

Who knows...

Sure there are workarounds, even with switch, but it just not justified restriction...