Maybe verification tools choke on pointer incrementing?
Having worked on a variety of code bases and coding styles, I think if there are coding rules and they are consistent across all the source files, it becomes easy to read even with wierdnesses. I hated perl with @_ and $_, but after working with it enough they became known quantities.
And you can probably read all the lines of code in your lifetime, since the whole microkernel is ~30k lines of code.
A good implementation would stick to the standard (size_t nor word_t), and would inc the pointer, not the counter. Formatting would be better (the final ; ouch).
This is junior stuff.