Well, there is this one post where Khaled stated the addition of a CASE statement would be slower than existing methods "since it would require more parsing". Though, for fairness sake, Khaled hasn't indicated that adding slowness to the script parser will automaticly rule out the addition of said feature (though I'm sure it's still considered).
Yes he said that, but he really didn't given any indication on how much slower it would be. Meaning the way I see mIRC's parser is something like a table:
{ "while", handle_while_function },
{ "if", handle_if_function },
etc. And each time mIRC encounters something in the file, it searches that table. So the way I see it, adding { "switch", handle_switch_function } would only mean one more comparison. And that's assuming Khaled does a linear search, if the table is sorted, then he can do a binary search which would mean that adding a switch would really mean a speed difference that is so small, it really isn't even measurable. But again, only Khaled can say for sure how it works, and for whatever reason he refuses to do so. Personally though, I don't see local aliases being much slower than local variables. For the most part, the logic would be the same. To simplify it even more he could make a new "command" instead of doing alias -l you do alias -a { ... } or something so that it can easily be deduced that it is a local alias. Like I said, I'm sure it will have some speed hit, but I don't think it will be large enough for anyone to notice.
