Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

But Cython also has long suffered from a cumbersome and counterintuitive syntax, an odd hybrid of C and Python. To add insult to injury ... return 0 elif val == 1 or val == 2: return 1 else ...