Programs with lots of deep branches are generally not well thought out and prone to bugs. In my view, every branch represents an "exception" to the main executi

Programs with lots of deep branches are generally not well thought out and prone to bugs. In my view, every branch represents an "exception" to the main execution path. The explosion of combinations of taken/not taken branches is what brings your program to an unpredictable state. The performance side is debatable, but with fewer branches a program is definitely simpler and more elegant.