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I think tables can work great for expressing such concepts, but Sturgeon's Law applies here, too: almost all table-based systems do it badly. Subtext has no problem with recursion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtext_%28programming_language...

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Very cool, I did not know that somebody had already gone and made a programming language like this. In watching the first ~10 minutes of the demo video [1] my thoughts were "Yes, this is a perfect example of where a table could be better than if/else," then when the warning indicators popped up at 5:50 "hmm, boolean algebra is still hard," and then at 7:30 with the demo of fibonacci/recursion "exploded expression trees that must be manipulated by mouse... let's go shopping."

But still, a lot of interesting thinking went into something like this, and it makes you wonder if it would be appropriate to "embed" a similar interface into an IDE for manipulating complex switch case/elseif chains.

[1] http://subtextual.org/subtext2.html

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