Johnny B. Getgoode tweeted a screenshot from his developer Discourse server on February 13, 2022. Experienced programmers cringed at the repeating lines of if else to determine if a number is even or odd. That prompted a lively discussion on how to “un-cringe” this function.

Here are four ways to refactor the function for readability and speed in Python: match and case, recursive inner function, modulo operator, and bitwise operator.

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