Why is default required for a switch on an enum?

Question

Normally, default is not necessary in a switch statement. However, in the following situation the code successfully compiles only when I uncomment the default statement. Can anybody explain why?

public enum XYZ {A,B};
public static String testSwitch(XYZ xyz)
{
    switch(xyz)
    {
    case A:
        return "A";
    case B:
    //default:
        return "B";
    }
}

Answer 1

The reason that you have to uncomment the default is that your function says that it returns a String, but if you only have case labels defined for A and B then the function will not return a value if you pass in anything else. Java requires that all functions that state that they return a value actually return a value on all possible control paths, and in your case the compiler isn't convinced that all possible inputs have a value returned.

I believe (and I'm not sure of this) that the reason for this is that even if you cover all your enum cases, the code could still fail in some cases. In particular, suppose that you compile the Java code containing this switch statement (which works just fine), then later on change the enum so that there's now a third constant - let's say C - but you don't recompile the code with the switch statement in it. Now, if you try writing Java code that uses the previously-compiled class and passes in C into this statement, then the code won't have a value to return, violating the Java contract that all functions always return values.

More technically speaking, I think the real reason is that the JVM bytecode verifier always rejects functions in which there is some control path that falls off the end of a function (see §4.9.2 of the JVM spec), and so if the code were to compile it would just get rejected by the JVM at runtime anyway. The compiler therefore gives you the error to report that a problem exists.