In mumble years of programming, I can't think of a single example where the overhead of a dispatch table versus cascading conditionals made a whit of difference compared to the cost of performing IO. Therefore, unless I ever write a FFT or a petabyte-Ethernet driver, I don't see much point to worrying about a handful of milliseconds of difference between two constructs where one is so much more maintainable than the other.

Then again, almost every program I've ever written performs some sort of IO somewhere.

As it's the holidays, can I wish that Benchmark refused to give meaningful results for syntax questions and only helped profile various algorithms?