On Jan 5, 2007, at 11:10 AM, gregarican wrote:

> Personally I like to adopt the old Smalltalk philosophy, where they
> don't even use case statements. Since over time these can grow long  
> and
> ungainly you can take a different programming approach. It's a bit  
> of a
> mind stretch depending on where you're coming from, but it is good
> practice. I think there's an older book called Smalltalk Best Practice
> Patterns that touches on this.

It's also a "code smell" according to the classic Refactoring text:

http://www.refactoring.com/catalog/ 
replaceConditionalWithPolymorphism.html

James Edward Gray II