This is an especially interesting comparison because while it does clearly exhibit the sort of elegance only achievable through the elimination of special cases

This is an especially interesting comparison because while it does clearly exhibit the sort of elegance only achievable through the elimination of special cases, it's also a good demonstration of the tradeoffs one sometimes has to make for this purpose. The second is significantly 'cleaner,' but with pretty bad readability [0]. The first version has excellent readability. In practice, the way I'd evaluate the two is by looking at how much other code depends on (or at some point may depend on) the piece under consideration. If nothing else or only very little depends on the code, I'll opt for readability; if it's likely to be somewhat foundational and other stuff is going to grow on it, I'll opt for the more abstract, cleaner version, and document thoroughly. [0] I'm guessing the readability isn't nearly as bad if the first example is using a common C idiom; I don't use C enough to know. My main criterion for judging readability is: how much does the structure of the code match the conception of the algorithm you're starting with. The conception here has to do with navigating links; the pointer stuff is incidental complexity.