Greg Ewing wrote:
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.
Good point.
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.
That would a very well hidden assignment of a "constantness" property to a symbol or expression. We'd also run into the problem of not knowing when to evaluate those case expressions, e.g. at function compile time, at run-time when first entering the switch statement, etc. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Jun 16 2006)
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