Re: to be effcient or not to be efficient

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Toby Hudon wrote:

>Then I'd like to hear it, because my last CS professor's idea of
>"efficient" switch handling was replacing a 22 case switch with a system
>where you have a class with a pure virtual function and then inherit from
>it for 22 subclasses, then in each subclass implement the virtual function
>which the orignial function call calls in place of the switch, so that

The same in couple of words: a pointer to a function.

C++ can do it automatically, but it's easy to do it in C manually too.
Actually I'm surprised if an optimizing C compiler can't do it
automatically from a switch statement, accessing a table of pointers to
functions after bounds checking. Just like linux system calls are handled.