Chained ifs add a whole lot of visual noise, aren't guaranteed to be total, and introduce the temptation to add more logic into the cases. That said, I do wish

Chained ifs add a whole lot of visual noise, aren't guaranteed to be total, and introduce the temptation to add more logic into the cases. That said, I do wish more languages had copied Haskell's guard syntax for this kind of chain... For reference, that looks like: cmp x y | (x == Nothing || y == Nothing) = NaN -- (assuming x and y are Maybe, but this would typically be non-idiomatic) | x < y = -1 | x > y = 1 | x >= y = 0 -- inert bug copied from original, "should" be == instead | otherwise = NaN