In computer science, a dispatch table is a table of pointers or memory addresses to functions or methods. Use of such a table is a common technique when implementing late binding in object-oriented programming.

Perl implementation

The following shows one way to implement a dispatch table in Perl, using a hash to store references to code (also known as function pointers). Running this Perl program as will produce "hello", and running it as will produce "goodbye".

JavaScript implementation

Following is a demo of implementing a dispatch table in JavaScript:

Virtual method tables

In object-oriented programming languages that support virtual methods, the compiler will automatically create a dispatch table for each object of a class containing virtual methods. This table is called a virtual method table or vtable, and every call to a virtual method is dispatched through the vtable.