A context-free grammar can do it; you'd have three productions "ascending comparison chain," "descending comparison chain" and "equality chain" to cover the val

A context-free grammar can do it; you'd have three productions "ascending comparison chain," "descending comparison chain" and "equality chain" to cover the valid possibilities. But, yeah, if there are contradictory comparisons, that should be deprecated and raise an error immediately because it indicates a logic error. If you're doing something awful like using custom operators for side-effects, just write out (a <= b) and (b > c). Most likely, though, no one is using custom operators for side-effects in chaining because the implicit `and` coerces arguments to booleans. So, with numpy, you can compare two ndarrays with a < b and it returns a new array of booleans, but you can't chain compare three ndarrays because `and` coerces the result to a single boolean.