Decision Tables

This technique, which undeservedly has a high-sounding title, is both simple in concept and easy to use. It is by no means new, having been used in other fields—notably production engineering—for at least twenty years. Yet it was not until the late 1960s that it began to be used on even a modest scale in data processing. The impetus, when it came, was regrettably for the wrong reason. It became possible to convert decision tables directly into computer machine code, thus saving programming effort. This benefit, though real, is quite insignificant when compared with the true value of decision tables.