Larry Evans wrote:
On 12/10/2005 09:09 AM, Yuval Ronen wrote:
One point in favour of array, is that it ensures us of O(1) lookup time. A good compiler might do that with switch/case but I'm not sure it's something that we can rely on.
Actually, Andy Little did a comparison which showed the switch was faster than the array:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.moderated/msg/6de73412e552c387
I'm not really sure, but I have feeling the switch/case advantage is marginal (am I right?). And another thing I'm not sure of is whether this must be the case with all compilers. If not, then I think I prefer a good algorithm to relying on compiler optimization which might not be so good in compilers other than those tested in this test. But that's just me...