Re: Optimization of "switch" stmt in C

mayur_naik@my-deja.com wrote:
> Could any one give me references to web-sites / papers / books
> which discuss the optimization of the "switch" stmt in C?
C is a long way from being the only language with a switch statement.


About 9 years ago, I read a paper published in the late 70s in, I
think, one of the Algol journals. I'm sorry this is a spectacularly
unhelpful reference but if you browse for a few hours in the
periodicals section of a good Computer Science library, I'd say you
had a good chance of finding it. Anyway the paper gave a general
dynamic-programming algorithm for finding the optimal (or for all I
can remember, near-optimal) mix of table lookup, binary trees, and
checking for equality. If you are really going to go all out, maybe
you need something like that.


As I say, I'm really sorry I can't give a better reference, but as
this is surely old stuff to a lot of people, I suspect someone in
comp.compilers can be a bit more precise. Or else surely GCC or some
such compiler must have such an algorithm buried in it, if you can be
bothered to hunt it down.

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