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The author is coming from the embedded world, where saving time in an important loop can determine whether or not your code can operate in the required time windows. Keep in mind that there are a lot of micros out there that are being used for new projects that have memory amounts in the hundreds or even tens of bytes. When you start getting into those areas, sometimes you have to cheat to get things working.

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Sure, in that case, then I agree with the saurik. The solution is you just put in more labels in your switch statement. And, if you aren't so keen on that sort of discipline, use a macro ALL_CMDS so you don't have to change nine places in the code.

Go "O(1)" on all the CMDs or don't, for the sake of ease of comprehension. In the hypothetical, or may be practical world[0] where size+computation constraints require you must goto some of them and if-else the rest of them, I suppose the "1/2goto,1/2if-else" optimization would be one of the latter considerations for optimization over a host of other things you can consider.

[0] I admit I don't hack in that world, but I do computational physics, which is more about vectorizing things, not optimization of branching typically.

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