The idea of using a table to represent a function implementation was proposed by Parnas, but in the context of software documentation.

This is quite nice if you can choose which function to represent with a table (as opposed to having to represent all functions as tables).

A recent publication on this:

Parnas D., Document based rational software development, Journal of Knowledge-Based Systems, 22(3):132-141, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2008.11.001