Switch Expressions

The classic switch statement works, but it carries baggage from the 1970s: missing break causes silent fall-through bugs, you can't return a value from it directly, and declaring variables across cases requires scope hacks. Java 14 added a redesigned switch that fixes all of this. It introduces arrow-form cases that don't fall through, lets switch produce a value like an expression, supports comma-separated multi-label cases, adds the yield keyword for block bodies, and asks the compiler to verify that an expression form covers every possibility. This lesson walks through each of those changes with e-commerce examples and shows when to use the new form and when to stay with the classic one.