alt Hacker NewsNot to mention that they insist on calling every entry of the list a "list head", which makes no sense (hysterical raisins, maybe?). The structure is made of a uniform loop of entries, one of which is used as the actual head & tail, or entry point into the structure.
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RustyRussell • today at 10:13 AM
Yes, it's terrible, and the fact that their list_add takes parameters backwards from what one might expect, with no types to catch mistakes!
See https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/blob/master/ccan/list/_...
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In general, there is no “actual” head and tail - you could have multiple references to different parts of the list, and each of them would have a different head. If you’re recursing through a list, at some point every node will be used as the head. This is a common pattern in recursive data structures, particularly in functional languages.
Disclaimer: I haven’t looked at this author’s code, just pointing out that list nodes that consist of (head, tail) are a common pattern with a clear rationale.