I find the "elegant" version easier to read and understand. But I think it also requires the reader to understand pointers pretty well, which, frankly, the majority of developers (who tend to work with interpreted or GC'd languages that don't have pointers / pointer arithmetic) probably don't have much familiarity with.
If a beginner C programmer reads this code, they might not understand until they have a little more experience under their belt. But I think that's ok; if we limited ourselves to writing code that beginners in the language can easily understand, we're going to miss out on a lot of important, useful techniques.
I do absolutely agree that cleverness should be avoided. We should optimize for later readers of our code. But I don't really see this as falling into the "clever" camp, at least not in way we mean "unmaintainable code".
If a beginner C programmer reads this code, they might not understand until they have a little more experience under their belt. But I think that's ok; if we limited ourselves to writing code that beginners in the language can easily understand, we're going to miss out on a lot of important, useful techniques.
I do absolutely agree that cleverness should be avoided. We should optimize for later readers of our code. But I don't really see this as falling into the "clever" camp, at least not in way we mean "unmaintainable code".