On 19 July 2013 08:19, John Gilmore <jwgli...@gmail.com> wrote: > Some all but random responses. [...] > The C language switch statement is defined very specifically and > carefully as an SBCS single-character facility. Not at all > incidentally, this definition ensures that branch tables can always be > used to implement a C switch statement.
One can argue that in the highly constrained hardware environments where C "grew up", a 256-byte branch table was far more of a barely thinkable extravagance than is a 64k one today. I would not be at all surprised to learn of some PDP-11 architectural construct that makes restricting switch statements to single byte values desirable for implementation purposes independent of the ability to use branch tables. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
