switch (expression)

[Henry Spencer]

In article <5255 at haddock.ISC.COM> karl at haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>In article <14036 at apple.Apple.COM> lenoil at apple.apple.com.UUCP (Robert Lenoil) writes:
>>It's really inefficient to do int comparisons when the actual thing you're
>>CASEing on is a byte.  I think that the type of the case labels should be
>>whatever the type of the switch expression...
>
>This is a Quality of Implementation issue...

Moreover, it is a machine-specific optimization.  Some machines are very
clumsy at byte handling; it is not at all impossible that on some of them
byte comparisons are considerably *less* efficient than int comparisons.