I’ve been focusing on esoteric features of language design for a while. I thought it might be nice to take a detour and explore something eminently practical and easy to explain, for a change.

Let’s talk data and tables.

I don’t mean databases–relational or otherwise; I’m talking about tables of data in source code itself. Sooner or later, every coder uses them. We build jump tables, tables of unicode character attributes, tables of time zone properties, tables of html entities, tables of multipliers to use in hash functions, tables that map zip codes to states, tables of dispatch targets, tables that tell us the internet domain-name suffix for a particular country name…

Depending on the language you’re using and the nature of your data, you might code such tables using arrays, structs, enums, dictionaries, hash maps, and so forth.

I think this is a mediocre solution, at best. Shouldn’t programmers work on funner stuff, like “traveling salesman” problems? :-)

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