[seanwoods]

Reminds me of "the highest level feature of C"

http://prog21.dadgum.com/166.html

"The possibilities when compiling a switch are much more varied. It can result in a trivial series of if..else statements. It can result in a binary search. Or, if the values are consecutive, a jump table. Or for a complex sequence, some combination of these techniques. If each case simply assigns a different value to the same variable, then it can be implemented as a range check and array lookup. The overall sweep of the solutions, from hundreds of sequential, mispredicted comparisons to a single memory read, is substantial."