[Androsynth]

I never said it was mind bending. I said it was a good mental exercise for young engineers to go through to fully understand pointers.

It's one thing to read about pointers, it's another to actually implement a linked list in C.

Again, I want to stress I don't think you should get awarded a PhD for it, but for first year CS majors: it is good practice to actually implement and debug pointer-based data structures.

[cheatercheater]

Yeah, but you're obviously arguing about that it's notable that you can learn about pointers. It's a tiny block of knowledge, really minuscule in comparison to other things which you can learn in the first year, such as the notion of an isomorphism, with assorted examples. I'd say this one can easily fill up about 100x more lab time.