Comment by CraigJPerry

> Prefers the former after a substitution...

That's not quite right, it's a substitution AND ablation of 2 functions and an enum from the code base.

There's quite a reduction in complexity he's advocating for.

Further, the enum and the additional boilerplate is not adding type safety in this example. Presumably the parameters to foo and bar are enforced in all cases so the only difference between the two examples is the additional boilerplate of a 2-armed enum.

I strongly suspect in this case (but i haven't godbolted it to be sure) that both examples compile to the same machine code. If my hunch is correct, then the remaining question is, does introduction of double-entry book keeping on the if condition add safety for future changes?

Maybe. But at what cost? This is one of those scenarios where you bank the easy win of reduced complexity.