My answer to that is "it's no longer a *trivial* single line of code, and should use braces." That nested if-else-if may have single *statements*, but it's not a single line of code, IMHO. Because C# uses "else if", as opposed to "elsif" or something like that, this is clearly in the territory of ambiguous code. My expectation is that unless the the parser considers whitespace a-la python, it will chunk the tokens as (if) (else if) (else), as opposed to (if) (else) { (if) (else) }.

That said, they're logically equivalent. Cribbing a bit of symbolic logic symbols (it's been too long since I've done any formal logic for the following to really be proper, but whatever):

vs.

Using the distributive property, the latter, of course, simplifies to:

which is identical to the other statement.

edit: fixed symbols.