Question

Was just a quick question to see if there are different ways you code something similar when it comes to evaluating conditional statements/control flow.

For example:

• If Statements
• Switch Statements

Is there any tidier way to do these as I have basically the option of If (value == X) { // do X } and Switch(value) { case X: ...

When doing this with over 100 values is there any data driven approach that could be taken or any different evaluation methods that would tidy up the code?

Answer 1

If your values are integers and are not sparse sometimes it can be convenient to use a lookup table (both for data and for code – in this last case you’d use function pointers and is often called a jump table, which is incidentally what the compiler often does with switch blocks); if the alternative is checking the possible values one by one, the performance jumps from O(N) to O(1).

Also, for non-integer data, hash tables can be used. How convenient they are depends from case to case.