But do the questions make sense to you?

Certainly - and I've often wondered, in passing, precisely what is going on there.
But I haven't ever gone to the extent of really trying to get to grips with it. (Gee, if I took the time to ponder everything I don't understand I'd lead a very troubled existence, indeed ;-)

Anyway, I'm glad you asked about it ... and even gladder that ikegami came up with some answers.

I'll look at modifying the "Discussion" of this code in the Cookbook, to explain some of what ikegami uncovered.
There's actually a bug in that "Discussion", anyway. It still mentions using strdup, which was replaced long ago by savepv.

Cheers,
Rob