From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Andy Walker <jawalker@stl.quik.com>
To: Zack Weinberg <zackw@stanford.edu>
Cc: GCC general mailing list <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Hashing of "switch/case" selections
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2001 18:12:00 -0000
Message-id: <3A5922B5.B099557A@stl.quik.com>
References: <3A4AC4FC.35E70BEE@stl.quik.com> <20010104013910.F12948@wolery.stanford.edu>
X-SW-Source: 2001-01/msg00338.html

Ok. I will.

    Andy

Zack Weinberg wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 27, 2000 at 10:43:40PM -0600, Andy Walker wrote:
> [much interesting stuff]
> > My experience as a programmer is that programs are almost never written
> > with switches to more than a few hundred cases.  I personally have never
> > seen one.  More than that, and the programmer finds a more efficient,
> > more readable, more maintainable solution, and he can do so because he
> > has a deep knowledge of the problem that is unavailable to the
> > compiler.  My seat-of-pants estimate is that 400 cases is a good, maybe
> > even high, maximum for Hash evaluations.  A program containing a switch
> > statement with more than 400 cases in it probably has enough other
> > severe design problems that it will never be worth running anyway.
>
> This is true in my experience for code written by humans, but not
> necessarily for machine-generated code.  Take a look at insn-attrtab.c
> in your GCC build directory, or at cp/parse.c in the source tree.
>
> zw