Just to reinforce this, the same is essentially true of all the languages I have touched. If the language has associative arrays ( e.g. maps ) all the better. But associativity is not difficult even in assembly language - so long as O(n) lookups are okay. Adding basic better-than-linear searches ( O(log(n)) ) is also not horribly complex - the 'C' library bsearch() is a conceptual template here.

Having large arrays of const data to drive 'C' programs can - emphasis can - lead to much more manageable 'C' code.