I submitted 417d713, which fixes the premature ends of sentences.

Apart from that, I don't think the situation is all that bad. There are only two nesting levels of lists (we've done much worse for less), and the placement of the examples isn't awful.

Even if you replaced the outer list by a sequence of paragraphs, you'd still have to deal with the examples in the inner list items, and short of making everything a long, flat list of paragraphs, I'm not sure how this could be improved.

@tkoeppe: Agreed with your conclusion. Let's close this.

Editorial meeting consensus: The remaining "or if not that" are wrong; we should say something like "if the previous bullet did not yield a comparison result both ways".