> [...] I don't want you to understand why it doesn't have the if statement. But I want you to understand that sometimes you can see a problem in a different wa

> [...] I don't want you to understand why it doesn't have the if statement. But I want you to understand that sometimes you can see a problem in a different way and rewrite it so that a special case goes away and becomes the normal case, and that's good code. [...] -- L. Torvalds I think the idea of this extends much beyond a linked-list implementation, into software design and architecture. Sometimes, you find more elegant solutions to something, that inherently do away with edge cases. I think this is the original intent, to show that you can find beauty, much as chessplayers do in chess. These solutions may be harder to understand completely, but you can actually encapsulate them in a function or use them as patterns! A point is also made, there's often a rewrite involved. You usually don't need to find this stuff on first try.