[zokier]

That imho seems like overcomplicating a relatively straight-forward piece of code without noticeable improvement. In the original code the intent is clear from the first line ("check the number of arguments"), but in your version I have to parse 7 lines of code before I find out that. Also in your code I'm required to keep larger, more complicated state (the map array) in my head when reading it. Your version also looks like it would perform worse than the original. Imho code that looks like it performs suboptimally is code that looks ugly, even if the performance difference in reality would be negligible.