a set of if...elsif...else statements which does essentially the same thing

It's almost the same. From what I recall of C programming, that language implements switches with jump i.e. it knows where in memory to find the code it needs to execute. This is akin to the hash solution that you mention. I've seen perl core dump on a program with too large a block of if..elsif..elsif... . That was a couple of years ago, but either way, I think that the dispatch table is the better solution for more reasons than just that.