You could do worse than Mach ports

[Peter da Silva]

>     So, no, making it table driven would take a lot longer to do and
>     probably not perform as well.

It seems to me that it would have a lot of advantages in standardising
the conversion and making it easier to move it to earlier or later
stages in the process... which could have an effect on performance, but
it could also be implemented at another time. Just a thought.