Today I learned a C trick. Here is my original printList:

void
printList(List L)
{
  Pos dummy; // creates a dummy node to traverse the list

  dummy = L->Next;

  while (dummy != NULL)
  {
    printf("%d->", dummy->Element);
    dummy = dummy->Next;
  }
}

It works but there is a small caveat in this routine. This is part of print out for the linkedListTestMain:

TEST: printList
23->44->45->57->89->-1->

As you can see, there is a little -> at the end of linked list, which is not supposed to be there because there is no next element after -1.

I try to solve this problem but the solution is not succint and I don't want to do complicated stuff just to remove this ->. Howver, I finally get a solution today that is very clean to eliminate -> without adding additional complexity to the routine.

In C, we know we can use if-else shorthand likes the following:

int x;
if (dummyA != NULL)
{
  x = dummyA->Digit;
}
else
{
  x = 0;
}

is equivalent with

int x;
(dummyA != NULL) ? (x = dummyA->Digit) : (x = 0);

We can use this shorthand inside our routine printf statement to solve our problem:

void
printList(List L)
{
  Pos dummy; // creates a dummy node to traverse the list

  dummy = L->Next;

  while (dummy != NULL)
  {
    printf("%d%s", dummy->Element, (dummy->Next) ? ("->") : (""));
    dummy = dummy->Next;
  }
}

As you can see, inside printf statement, we don't printout -> by default, we check if dummy->Next is NULL, then that means we are at the last element of the list, and we don't append anything (i.e. ("")). However, if this is not the case, we print ->.