As you note in your edit; we already have to watch for that pitfall :) so really the best way out is to be as verbose as possible imo; a = a + c or auto nodep

As you note in your edit; we already have to watch for that pitfall :) so really the best way out is to be as verbose as possible imo; a = a + c or auto nodep = *nodepp; nodep->next; Compilers and compute performance have grown to make the difference negligible for code output and compilation times but they definitely take a lot of mental complexity out of such scenarios (anything helps when grokking 10k+ lines of code).