At a previous job, there was a legacy UI application that had a 10,000+ line file called "messloop.c". It consisted of a function called messloop(), which was a

At a previous job, there was a legacy UI application that had a 10,000+ line file called "messloop.c". It consisted of a function called messloop(), which was an infinite loop with a massive switch statement inside of it. I never had to work on it, but I'm told it was a maintenance nightmare. So when I read the author's code and saw the way he handled a similar problem, I was intrigued. If you had to deal with a massive switch statement with thousands of cases, it would probably be easier to maintain IMHO. For a hobby project, the author's solution is 100% correct and I'm not critiquing it at all. In fact, the only reason I even commented was because I thought his solution was better than any other procedural solution I had seen before. With that said, in an enterprise environment, where maintainability is crucial, I'd argue that a massive switch statement is probably a bad idea. Going back to messloop.c, what happens if the user tries to change a floating point value through the UI? Well, I can tell you that there is a case statement for that somewhere in messloop.c. What is that case statement called? I'm not sure, all I know is it's a #define that I'm sure made sense to the original author. It's basically a needle-in-a-haystack problem.