The old version of this code would blindly perform arithmetic without paying attention to whether the types involved were pointers or integers. This could lead to weird expressions like negating a pointer.
Explicitly handle simple cases involving pointers, like "x < y ? x : y". In all other cases, coerce the operands of the comparison to integer types. This avoids the weird cases, while handling most of the interesting cases.
Repeated code, masking a variable.