Programming question! :)

[Zac67]

Actually, comparing against an array uses less RAM all in all (just the values and the loop, you save the space of all but one cmp and blt ops minus loop ops). On a somewhat caching CPU it should also perform better since the loop needs only be fetched once and then just the array values get read - the slowest is always the memory. Without cache your approach will be faster, saving the loop overhead.

Also depends on the indexing range the CPU is capable of, of course...

You could also combine both methods with a larger loop (did that once on a 6502 to save the few cycles I needed).

[Zac67]

A binary tree search with recursion will result in very compact code but the recursion bit may take up a bit of stack space... You can do it the iterative way as well with more code and much less elegance. Plus, it'll (probably) be a lot faster.

[Zac67]

Reminds me of when I tried to calculate the Mandelbrot set without any(!) multiplications - it was hideously fast on a non-FPUd 68000 (for the time) but the precision was really crap - not surprising, I used a 16 bit table of squares together with (a+b)^2-a^2-b^2=2ab. 128KB was no problem but a somewhat usable 32 bit table would take 16 GB - still waiting for that to come around...