In defence of the technique, the command table is quite succinct and arguably more readable at a glance than if there were a bunch of constants |ed together. I have no idea whether this was the original motivation though.
ACTUALLY! It reminds me of a technique Bisqwit used when he made his emulator. He used strings to define the behavior of certain instructions, the strings were actually interpreted at compile time. Though I think this is a C++ specific trick.
