http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=587084


in reply to When should I use a dispatch table?

I must admit that my eyes popped somewhat at "I have re-written your code to be much more efficient." in that node. However I was too busy to bother benchmarking it and the dispatch table is much cleaner than the original code in any case so I let it go.

I'm glad to see that you've followed up with some actual testing and the result doesn't much surprise me. Another thing to consider is that if at the time of coding you know the likely hit rate for each of the tests, the chained if/elsif can be much more efficient by testing the most likely hits first. That is still nasty code to write, test and maintain compared with the dispatch table, but stooping to "assembly language" techniques has to be a win sometimes. :)


DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel