感谢网友full_of_bull投递此文（注：此文最初发表在这个这里，我对原文后半段修改了许多，并加入了插图）

Linus大婶在slashdot上回答一些编程爱好者的提问，其中一个人问他什么样的代码是他所喜好的，大婶表述了自己一些观点之后，举了一个指针的例子，解释了什么才是core low-level coding。

下面是Linus的教学原文及翻译——

“At the opposite end of the spectrum, I actually wish more people understood the really core low-level kind of coding. Not big, complex stuff like the lockless name lookup, but simply good use of pointers-to-pointers etc. For example, I’ve seen too many people who delete a singly-linked list entry by keeping track of the “prev” entry, and then to delete the entry, doing something like。（在这段话的最后，我实际上希望更多的人了解什么是真正的核心底层代码。这并不像无锁文件名查询（注：可能是git源码里的设计）那样庞大、复杂，只是仅仅像诸如使用二级指针那样简单的技术。例如，我见过很多人在删除一个单项链表的时候，维护了一个”prev”表项指针，然后删除当前表项，就像这样）”

if (prev)
    prev->next = entry->next;
else
    list_head = entry->next;

and whenever I see code like that, I just go “This person doesn’t understand pointers”. And it’s sadly quite common.（当我看到这样的代码时，我就会想“这个人不了解指针”。令人难过的是这太常见了。）

People who understand pointers just use a “pointer to the entry pointer”, and initialize that with the address of the list_head. And then as they traverse the list, they can remove the entry without using any conditionals, by just doing a “*pp = entry->next”. （了解指针的人会使用链表头的地址来初始化一个“指向节点指针的指针”。当遍历链表的时候，可以不用任何条件判断（注：指prev是否为链表头）就能移除某个节点，只要写)

*pp = entry->next

So there’s lots of pride in doing the small details right. It may not be big