In computer science, a dispatch table is a table of pointers or memory addresses to functions or methods.[1] Use of such a table is a common technique when implementing late binding in object-oriented programming.
The following shows one way to implement a dispatch table in Perl, using a hash to store references to code (also known as function pointers).
# Define the table using one anonymous code-ref and one named code-refmy %dispatch = ( "-h" => sub { return "hello\n"; }, "-g" => \&say_goodbye); sub say_goodbye { return "goodbye\n";} # Fetch the code ref from the table, and invoke itmy $sub = $dispatch{$ARGV[0]};print $sub ? $sub->() : "unknown argument\n";
Running this Perl program as perl greet -h
will produce "hello", and running it as perl greet -g
will produce "goodbye".
Following is a demo of implementing dispatch table in JavaScript:
var thingsWeCanDo = { doThisThing : function() { /* behavior */ }, doThatThing : function() { /* behavior */ }, doThisOtherThing : function() { /* behavior */ }, default : function() { /* behavior */ }};var doSomething = function(doWhat) { var thingToDo = thingsWeCanDo.hasOwnProperty(doWhat) ? doWhat : "default" thingsWeCanDo[thingToDo]();}
In object-oriented programming languages that support virtual methods, the compiler will automatically create a dispatch table for each object of a class containing virtual methods. This table is called a virtual method table or vtable, and every call to a virtual method is dispatched through the vtable.