Comment by macspoofing

I understand the general point (and value) of reframing the problem or the solution in a way that removes special cases ... but in this case I would actually prefer the first solution over the second. The second solutions reminds me of the old-school perl culture, and JavaScript culture, where 'cleverness' (which always manifests itself as terseness as if lines of code were expensive), takes precedence over maintainability and understandability. Your code is going to be potentially maintained years in the future by developers of all levels - make it easy on them by practicing the principle of least surprise. In this case, this means using a traditional implementation of a linked list that most developers would be familiar with.