It's not subjective. Intel's guidelines for writing vectorizable code:

Prefer array notation to the use of pointers. C programs in particular impose very few restrictions on the use of pointers; aliased pointers may lead to unexpected dependencies. Without help, the compiler often cannot tell whether it is safe to vectorize code containing pointers.

Source: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/8c/a9/Compile... (Section 5.1)

yep - signal your intentions as specifically to the compiler as possible, so that it can generate as optimized output as possible.

Array access is more specific and intentional than pointer arithmetic.

What are the odds this turns out to be practical advice for this example?

High. E.g. gcc 4.8.2 vectorizes this on my machine (-march=native -mtune=native -O3 -ffast-math -ftree-vectorizer-verbose=1):

  for (size_t i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
    sum += a[i];
    sum += b[i];
  }

(a and b have the same length)

But doesn't vectorize:

  for (double *p = a; p < a + n; ++p) {
    sum += *p;
    sum += *(b + (p-a));
  }

(Yes, you can make an extra pointer for b, but just for the sake of the example.)

tl;dr: your compiler writer probably knows better than you.

The poster did not sum values. They used the loop to call into printf. I'm guessing they didn't also use those particular compiler options... What you have here sounds like a lot of tuning that does not apply equally for all scenarios.

I would have to agree. IMO it lends itself to cleaner code if you're working with NULL terminated lists, especially if you use a `for` when doing the iteration instead of a `while`:

    const char **a;

    for (a = job->accomplishments; *a; a++)
        printf(" - %s\n", *a);

And

    job_t *j;
    for (j = jobs; *j; j++)
        print_job(j);

The person who wrote this code seems to dislike `for`s for some reason it seems, these are pretty obvious places to use one IMO, using an index `i` or not. Doing it with a `while` separates out the initialization, condition, and increment in his code, and 'continue' won't work like you normally want it too.