OK, so this little programming post is nothing like rocket science, it really isn’t. It is, however, REALLY useful, and something that almost nobody knows about the C language. We came across it when we were porting a game a few years ago, and none of us had ever seen it before. We tried it, and it works!

So, lets take a C switch statement

switch (somenumber)
{
case 1:
case 2:
case 3:
  do_something();
  break;
case 4:
case 5:
case 6:
  do_something else();
  break;
}

Fairly standard, nothing too unusual here. However there is another way to do it!

switch (somenumber)
{
case 1 ... 3:
  do_something();
  break;
case 4 ... 6:
  do_something else();
  break;
}

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work on anything other than C/C++, which is a shame!

Enjoy!