[Python-Dev] Switch statement (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Fri Jun 16 06:13:34 CEST 2006

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

My personal favorite is making the compiler smarter to detect the mentioned if-elif-else scheme and generate code which uses a lookup table for implementing fast branching.

But then the values need to be actual compile-time constants, precluding the use of symbolic names, values precomputed a run time, etc.

A new statement would allow us to simply document that the case values are assumed constant, and then the implementation could cache them in a dict or whatever.

-- Greg

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