Getting that wrong shows how much I work with the different variants of * BSD...

That's a syntactic style guide; I was referring to higher-level issues at the design level, like "avoid dynamic allocation unless absolutely necessary", which are between syntax and the general very-high-level "follow the UNIX philosophy" type of guidelines.

To answer the sibling comments about preparing a patch and sending it in: this was just an observation I had from a brief glance at the code; I don't have the resources to delve into the research and find out if this is actually something they would want to change, if there is a reason behind doing it this way, or only the norm for the project (e.g. the Java community largely has a very different notion of what it means to "simplify" code) - so if someone wants to take these ideas and follow through, they are more than welcome to.