Forgotten treasures I: Look-up tables

Think fast: how would you convert a bool to a string, "TRUE" or "FALSE", in C? Most of us probably answers "with an if-statement", and when asked to show some code doing it end up with something like:

const char* theString;
if (theBool)theString = "TRUE";
elsetheString = "FALSE";

or some similar code using the conditional operator as follows:

const char* theString = (theBool ? "TRUE" : "FALSE");

But there is at least one more way of doing it, which in some cases gives more readable code. I'm speaking of look-up tables. The code above can be expressed by look-up tables like this:

static const char* options[] = { "FALSE", "TRUE" };
const char* theString = options[theBool];

which is much less code compare to the above if-then-else version. It's slightly more code, though, compared to the conditional operator-version. However, I personally find code using the conditional operator hard to read. I know perfectly well how the conditional operator works, but I still need a few more brain cycles to read such code.

On the other hand, I have no problems at all reading code using look-up tables since code like options[theBool] looks very similar to a normal function call. Of course, there are down-sides to using look-up tables; the most important one is that the result is undefined if you index outside the range of the table.

Another way of using arrays like this is when you need to decode a tree structure. Let's say we have three ints which represents a path in a tree.
   Node root = { "Root", layer1Nodes[node1], 0 };
   Node layer1Nodes[] = { { "L1A", layer1ANodes[node1]  } };

During the last year I've gone from primarily developing Java to write C++, C, and assembler. I have to admit, there are a few idioms that I have rediscovered in this transition to C and assemble. Look-up tables are on such treasure.

Of course, there is now real reason why look-up tables can't be used in, e.g., Java, but it seems like the coding traditions in Java discourage such code. Other languages encourage such  code; for instance lists and dicts are very common in Python as a tool for simplifying expressions. It's a bit funny what different communities value in their code.