Yup, potential performance issues were the first things that came to my mind on seeing that code too. Plus, it's just silly to say that someone that just wrote

Yup, potential performance issues were the first things that came to my mind on seeing that code too. Plus, it's just silly to say that someone that just wrote a linked list doesn't understand pointers - pretty much by definition they do understand pointers, otherwise their linked list isn't going to work. My personal rule of thumb concerning pointers is that two-stars should never be seen except in the case where you want a function to be able to modify a pointer that was passed in as a parameter. That's it. If I get handled a module that has two-stars in it under any other circumstance, I refactor it. I do this because: a) lots of people find it difficult to thing about pointers to pointers (although I've never understood why empirically I note that this is the case). b) Having to dereference two pointers to get to the information that you want is not just slow because of extra work needing to be done, but also because you've just increased the need for doing a page change in memory, which on some architectures can be surprisingly expensive.