Grouping switch statement cases together?

Question

I may be over looking something but is there a simple way in C++ to group cases together instead of writing them out individually? I remember in basic I could just do:

SELECT CASE Answer
CASE 1, 2, 3, 4

Example in C++ (For those that need it):

#include <iostream.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
   int Answer;
   cout << "How many cars do you have?";
   cin >> Answer;
   switch (Answer)                                      
      {
      case 1:
      case 2:
      case 3:
      case 4:
         cout << "You need more cars. ";
         break;                                        
      case 5:
      case 6:
      case 7:
      case 8:
         cout << "Now you need a house. ";
         break;                                        
      default:
         cout << "What are you? A peace-loving hippie freak? ";
      }
      cout << "\nPress ENTER to continue... " << endl;
      getchar();
      return 0;
}

Answer 1

AFAIK all you can do is omit the returns to make things more compact in C++:

switch(Answer)
{
    case 1: case 2: case 3: case 4:
        cout << "You need more cars.";
        break;
    ...
}

(You could remove the other returns as well, of course.)

Answer 2

Sure you can.

You can use case x ... y for the range

Example:

#include <iostream.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
   int Answer;
   cout << "How many cars do you have?";
   cin >> Answer;
   switch (Answer)                                      
      {
      case 1 ... 4:
         cout << "You need more cars. ";
         break;                                        
      case 5 ... 8:
         cout << "Now you need a house. ";
         break;                                        
      default:
         cout << "What are you? A peace-loving hippie freak? ";
      }
      cout << "\nPress ENTER to continue... " << endl;
      getchar();
      return 0;
}

Make sure you have "-std=c++0x" flag enabled within your compiler

Answer 3

No, but you can with an if-else if-else chain which achieves the same result:

if (answer >= 1 && answer <= 4)
  cout << "You need more cars.";
else if (answer <= 8)
  cout << "Now you need a house.";
else
  cout << "What are you? A peace-loving hippie freak?";

You may also want to handle the case of 0 cars and then also the unexpected case of a negative number of cars probably by throwing an exception.

PS: I've renamed Answer to answer as it's considered bad style to start variables with an uppercase letter.

As a side note, scripting languages such as Python allow for the nice if answer in [1, 2, 3, 4] syntax which is a flexible way of achieving what you want.