Dispatch tables (hashes with coderefs as values) are a relatively well-known "advanced" technique in Perl and pretty widely used and respected. Personally, I'm using it a lot these days to create programs with a "plugin"-type structure, but it's also used heavily in web frameworks or other contexts where you normally receive a string from an outside source (the UI, a config file, the other end of a network connection, etc.) telling you what to do, then look that string up to find out how to do it. It's simpler, more extensible, and more efficient to match the command to the implementation with a hash lookup than a long if-elsif chain.

Regarding your concern about it seeming "sort of similar to symbolic references", the most common response I see to "use a variable as a variable name" questions is that you should instead put your data in a hash and look it up by name that way. This is the exact same thing. The hash just contains coderefs instead of static data values.

In reply to Re^2: Creating dispatch table with variable in function name by dsheroh
in thread Creating dispatch table with variable in function name by nysus

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