On: Python idioms I wish I'd learned earlier

[SixSigma]

It's called a jump table or vtable.

It's one of the examples in Forth. Plan 9 uses that technique in C a lot too.

This example is ramfs which creates an in memory file system (that you can mount in Unix btw, in 166 LoC)

http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/src/lib9p/ramfs.c

fsopen, fsread, fswrite, fscreate are C functions declared in the same source file :

    Srv fs = {
	.open=	fsopen,
	.read=	fsread,
	.write=	fswrite,
	.create=	fscreate,
    };

fs is then passed to a library which calls them as needed.