If you want to read about horrible but entertaining C hacks, check out the entries in the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, the book that came out of the

If you want to read about horrible but entertaining C hacks, check out the entries in the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, the book that came out of the contests a few years back, or books like Deep C Secrets. http://www.ioccc.org/ http://www.ioccc.org/ As an developer who has written a lot of shipping code in C and C++ for almost 30 years, I would strongly advise you to write your switch statements in as straightforward a way as possible. If you use fall through, place very noticeable /* FALL THROUGH */ comments to indicate that you meant to do that. If you wind up doing some kind of oddball thing because you _have confirmed_ that it results in significantly better optimization for a specific hardware target and compiler, comment the crap out of that, maybe make it conditional with an #if block, and (what I prefer to do is) write the simple version too, test both versions, and keep the simple version as a comment, so a future maintainer can verify that the complicated code is doing what you intended.