I can't speak for the authors but I think I'd file that one under "and if you write this, ideally a small gnome exits the back of the computer and hits the deve

I can't speak for the authors but I think I'd file that one under "and if you write this, ideally a small gnome exits the back of the computer and hits the developer with a mallet." I'd be perfectly happy refactoring that so I could have an 'a or b' test (I'm assuming $something means that x(0, 0) not free-ing is correct in real code because nitpicking an illustrative example would be silly). Though note that I'm sufficiently bad at tracking things right when writing C that I tend to spend most of my debugging time figuring out what stupid mistake I made to cause the current segfault - so I'm probably more willing than average to write code differently if it helps me avoid that ;)