'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Yep, but here we're still in the stone age with 1.4.2_06 as the version the lecturers a) expect us to use and b) have installed on all the Informatics boxen.

I prefer switching on strings instead of if..else as I find it cleaner and easier to read. When you get down to it, most stuff like switch is just there to be nice to the programmer. Plus I come from a VB background, and VB has this nice trick of making String a native data type (as opposed to a class in Java, or some glorified byte array in C), and so means you can use Strings just about anywhere you can use numbers. There's also a dedicated concatenation operator, which is nice (and really confused me first time I tried C with MFC's CString - '&' is concatenation in VB and address-of in C) and needed as you can do some funky stuff if you use '+' instead. Basically, "3" + "4" is not the same as "3" & "4", as VB does on-the-fly type conversion too well at times.