In C a pointer is an object in its own right, so referring to the contents of a pointer, p, means the same thing as referring to the contents of an integer, i;

In C a pointer is an object in its own right, so referring to the contents of a pointer, p, means the same thing as referring to the contents of an integer, i; namely, the value held by the object. A pointer value has semantic meaning and usefulness the same as an integer value, completely divorced from the machine representation, which in a pure C program should always be irrelevant for pointer and arithmetic types alike. I don't think I can articulate well why it's important to keep in mind and appreciate value semantics. Certainly many C programmers, especially the newer ones, are far too concerned with value representation rather than the abstract value itself, often conflating the two. I guess one good example of why it's important to understand pointers as proper objects with abstract values is when working with pointers-to-pointers, pointers-to-pointers-to-pointers, etc. Pointer arithmetic is another case, which doesn't overlap with the former as much as you'd think. In these cases understanding pointers as values is important to understanding the semantics of a program, and more generally how to leverage the language efficiently and safely. Note that these semantics have no analog in references, the construct in, e.g., C++. It doesn't make sense to conceptualize references as independent objects; rather, a reference is a syntactic construct, no more an object than a list initializer. Yeah, as a C programmer I would find it kind of odd if someone seemed to conceptually elide the character of pointers as proper first-class objects.