You know what's even better? When someone who writes that style of code (in C++, no less!) knows that one of the intermediate values could be null, so they use

You know what's even better? When someone who writes that style of code (in C++, no less!) knows that one of the intermediate values could be null, so they use a set of macros involving setjmp and longjmp, and trap SIGFPE, all to implement a fragile sort of try/catch for null de-references. Clever? Insane? Horribly un-portable and prone to breakage depending on compiler, libc, and OS versions? All of the above! (And yes, I have seen this coding style used in multiple projects at a major corporation. It was a favorite of a coder-turned manager, which means it tended to sneak in on any project he supervised.)