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by vore 971 days ago
The part that's confusing me is the part about avoiding clutter – if you have to do all the checks anyway, what clutter are you avoiding by changing the order of them?
2 comments

That conditional would be checked, then if it failed, checked again after the normal case has run, in order to choose the arm to follow.

Not a huge deal execution-time-wise, but from a reader’s PoV, the way I write it says, “ok, the special cases don’t apply to the body so I don’t have to worry that the index will be out of range (or whatever) and can just focus on the logic”.

I believe the likelihood annotations are the things they are talking about, for cluttering the code. Not the argument checks.