Table-driven assemblers (and disassemblers) have been a thing for a long time, especially for more obscure/embedded architectures. Reverse-engineering/analysis

Table-driven assemblers (and disassemblers) have been a thing for a long time, especially for more obscure/embedded architectures. Reverse-engineering/analysis tools likewise have traditionally done the same, but with additional semantic information for each instruction. A quick search for table-driven compilers reveals some mid-century papers.