I am a reasonably competent python coder, yet when I see stuff like this I regard it with the same suspicion as a switch in the "more magic" position.

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

What's the operator precedence in python?

Is it `assert(0 <= (1 < ndim))` or `assert((0 <= 1) < ndim)`, or something even stranger like `assert(0 <= 1) < ndim`?

Python actually does something pretty neat: it chains comparisons so that `x < y <= z` is like `x < y and y <= z` except y is only evaluated once

In linked code we can be confident that `0 <= 1`, so only `1 < ndim` should matter. In fact I'd expect peephole optimization to remove most of the code for `0 <= 1`

I did not know that python fact. Thanks for sharing!