The fact that pointers to Foo are "free" doesn't invalidate the notion that the * is, in some sense, a semantic extension of whatever Foo is and thus a generic

The fact that pointers to Foo are "free" doesn't invalidate the notion that the * is, in some sense, a semantic extension of whatever Foo is and thus a generic type. I know that this is not literally true in the "theory" of the C programming language and type system, but conceptually it matches up pretty well.