It's still absolutely no more difficult with if statements, and with if statements you don't have to worry about error prone fall through. There is no lack of consensus on how to do this. It's very obvious.

Concise? I've got some perl code for you.

There's no error-prone fall through in the code I posted. You would advocate the following pseudocode?

  if beercount is 0 or 1 return "inanity"
  if beercount is in 2,3,4 return "good sense"
  return "genius"

I wouldn't advocate that. I think my first version is more concise in a clear way, not in a line-noise way.

your formating fucking blows.