There's no reason an if/else chain can't be optimized to a jump table where appropriate. In fact, Perl 4 did that optimization, though we never got around to putting it into Perl 5. Anyway, if you think Perl 6's switch structure precludes such an optimization, you are simply wrong. There's no reason to test any expression that you already know the results of, so such a Perl 6 switch statement can be made just as fast as a C-style switch statement if you limit the cases to constants. But Perl can extend the optimization to the case of strings with unique prefixes, and to ordinary if/else cascades as well, while retaining all the benefits of cascading logic in the more dynamic cases.