It's probably worth remembering the history of C - it didn't appear fully formed, lots of stuff evolved as people used it - for example in V6 Unix += used to b

It's probably worth remembering the history of C - it didn't appear fully formed, lots of stuff evolved as people used it - for example in V6 Unix += used to be =+. In particular you used to use structures in a weird way, essentially field names within structures lived in their own global name space, any pointer could be used with any structure - there weren't unions yet so this was used for good effect in Unix kernel drivers (there was a standard buffer queue header you could add your own stuff at the end of. I think this was kind of descended from the BCPL/Bliss world view where explicit pointers were a relatively new thing in languages and their typing was pretty simple (there was a limit to the number of indirections allowed) - fully orthogonal typing systems were only just becoming a thing then. Also I suspect that the idea that a[i] was the same as a+i was an idea with legs, this is still legal C: char *x() { int i; char *p; return &i[p]; }