"->" is taken from the IBM PL/I language, which was an important source of various syntax elements of C (the other 2 main sources being BCPL and Algol 68). It

"->" is taken from the IBM PL/I language, which was an important source of various syntax elements of C (the other 2 main sources being BCPL and Algol 68). It was added because the indirection operator "*" has the wrong position in C, it is prefix instead of being postfix, like in the languages where it had first appeared, i.e. Euler and Pascal, which had inherited it from Euler (both are Wirth languages). Had "*" been postfix, ".*" could have always been used instead of "->". As it is, "->" eliminates a pair of parentheses that is needed when the indirection is followed by other postfix operators, like array indexing or structure member selection, which happens very frequently. IIRC, in one of his papers about the history of C, Dennis Ritchie has recognized several mistakes in the design of C and one of them was the prefix "*", besides others like the precedence of "&" and "|". In PL/I "->" was the only indirection operator, while CPL had no explicit indirection, the indirection was implicit whenever a pointer was used in an expression, like with the C++ references. The CPL pointers (which were named references, "pointer" is a term introduced later by PL/I) could use a special assignment operator, which assigned the address of an expression, not its value. While "->" is somewhat redundant, its sole purpose being to eliminate some parentheses, it is no more redundant than e.g. the existence of both "for" and "while" or of "do ... while" when "break" exists, or of the comma operator, or of several other redundant features of C, which offer alternative ways of writing the same thing, with slightly shorter variants for certain use cases. While C has much less redundancy than Perl (which is proud of it), it still has much more than I consider good for a programming language. When structures had been added to C, they had realized that the wrong position of "*" requires extra parentheses, but they must have had plenty of code written in late B and early C that had used "*", so instead of redefining "*" they have chosen the easier path of taking the structures from PL/I together with all their syntax elements used in PL/I, i.e. the keyword "struct" and the operators "." and "->".