Everyone should write your second example. The first does nothing but confuse. C has enough hazing rituals without garbage like "-->".
The fewer tricks and patterns you use in C, the higher chance actual bugs have of being caught. Cutesy tricks like "-->" confuse human analysis and gain nothing.
This is about weighing correction versus readability. In the "arrow operator" version, the readability is decreased; in the "proper" version, a type cast is required, and this can lead to bugs with values greater than 2^sizeof(ssize_t).
Obviously, I just follow the convention when contributing to an existing project.
this can lead to bugs with values greater than 2^sizeof(ssize_t)
The range of indexable array elements is not only constrained by the unsigned type size_t, but also by the signed type ptrdiff_t, so you could always go with the latter instead of the non-ISO ssize_t.
Right, my bad. I tend to write loops in the former style, thinking of them as reversed(range(9)). This is another advantage of this style. I should have been more cautious when writing the second one.
The point is that a beginner does not need to care about signedness. When you get to that point, you can take the time to explain how to loop properly over it.
