Abandoning switch In Three (And A Bit) Steps

Everyone who’s worked in a C-derived language has seen a switch statement or two in their lives. There are a few well-known reasons not to use them, but somehow they crop up now and then anyways because they’re just so convenient — initially.

Switch is a holdover from lower-level languages (mostly, various assembly languages) where the destination of a jmp instruction could be computed or looked up in a table. In modern languages, there are usually more appropriate structures for determining which piece of code to jump to: that’s what virtual dispatch does, for example.

Unfortunately, it’s not always obvious how to “fix” code that makes heavy use of switch.

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