Flipped switch statements? - switch-statement

Question

Consider you have 10 boolean variables of which only one can be true at a time, and each time any one is 'switched on', all others must be 'turned off'. One of the problems that immediately arises is;
How can you quickly test which variable is true without necessarily
having to linearly check all the variable states each time?
For this, I was thinking if it was possible to have something like:
switch(true)
{
case boolean1:
//do stuff
...
//other variables
}
This looks like a bad way of testing for 10 different states of an object, but I think there're cases where this kind of feature may prove useful and would like to know if there's any programming language that supports this kind of feature?

Answer 1

There isn't a language feature that offers this behavior. But as an alternative, you could use the Command Pattern, in conjunction with a Priority Queue. This assumes that you would be able to prioritize what checks should be done.

Answer 2

Traditionally, when you have such radio button boolean values you use an integer to represent them:
+------------+---------+--------------------+
| BINARY | DECIMAL | BINARY-LOGARITHMIC |
+------------+---------+--------------------+
| 0000000001 | 1 | 0 |
| 0000000010 | 2 | 1 |
| 0000000100 | 4 | 2 |
| 0000001000 | 8 | 3 |
| 0000010000 | 16 | 4 |
| 0000100000 | 32 | 5 |
| 0001000000 | 64 | 6 |
| 0010000000 | 128 | 7 |
| 0100000000 | 256 | 8 |
| 1000000000 | 512 | 9 |
+------------+---------+--------------------+
Let's call the variable holding this boolean value flag. We can quickly jump to some code based on the flag by indexing a random access array of functions:
var functions = [ function0
, function1
, function2
, function3
, function4
, function5
, function6
, function7
, function8
, function9
];
functions[flag](); // quick jump
However, you will have to pay for the function call overhead.