I started coding in the 70s when C first came out. Conflating arrays and pointers was, to me at the time, a huge win. I agree it was a mistake in the long run,

I started coding in the 70s when C first came out. Conflating arrays and pointers was, to me at the time, a huge win. I agree it was a mistake in the long run, but given the state of the art at the time, it gave so much power to the high level programmer that up to that point only assembly level developers had. I was able to move code that up to then had been coded in assembly to C. That's the benefit that people today miss.