I've written code like the first example many times, and I always felt a little "dirty" for doing it - I could tell there had to be some way to avoid treating h

I've written code like the first example many times, and I always felt a little "dirty" for doing it - I could tell there had to be some way to avoid treating head as a special case, but I was too lazy to actually work out how. The author of the second example may be "clever", but he also didn't give up.