Interestingly although all of C's other types are in fact just the machine integers wearing funny hats (e.g. char is just either a signed or unsigned byte depen

Interestingly although all of C's other types are in fact just the machine integers wearing funny hats (e.g. char is just either a signed or unsigned byte depending on platform, float is just the 32-bit unsigned integers as binary fractions) the pointers are not actually just integers. They could be, but it's much worse from a performance perspective if you just have these raw machine addresses rather than the pointers in the C language so actual C compilers haven't done that for many years. ISO/IEC TS 6010 describes the best current attempt to come up with coherent semantics for these pointers, or here's a Rustier perspective https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2020/12/14/provenance.html https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2020/12/14/provenance.html [today Rust specifically says its pointers have provenance and what that means, like that TS for the C language] Now, if you read Ralf's post and want to argue about that I'm afraid there are already lots of HN discussions and your point has probably already been made so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419740 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42878450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42878450