The part that's confusing me is the part about avoiding clutter – if you have to do all the checks anyway, what clutter are you avoiding by changing the order of them?
Not a huge deal execution-time-wise, but from a reader’s PoV, the way I write it says, “ok, the special cases don’t apply to the body so I don’t have to worry that the index will be out of range (or whatever) and can just focus on the logic”.