I need this done in the next 15 seconds!

j/k, of course.

I wrote a program in a different language (ObjectPAL) a couple years ago, and execution speed was very (X100) important to my boss, so much so that he made us replace every if statement with a switch statement with only one case, because he said it was faster. So - would that be language specific, or is it a difference that could be attributed to the difference in data structures? Which one's faster in C?