My mental model for C is symbol-referent diagrams like the first picture on http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/c-language/c-pointers.html http://www.exforsys.com

My mental model for C is symbol-referent diagrams like the first picture on http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/c-language/c-pointers.html http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/c-language/c-pointers.html If you keep track of which boxes are and are not runtime memory cells, that should be enough to work out any particular C pointer problem except the pointer-array almost-equivalence mess.