[jevoten]

> The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation;

How were pointers handled before?

[globular-toast]

What he's talking about is pointer arithmetic. In assembly you have to "know" what is being pointed at such that you can access an element in an array or a component of a composite type, for example. The computer only knows about bytes. In C you can just do stuff like `(p + 6)->t` and the compiler knows how many bytes "+6" is because it knows what `p` is pointing at.

[layer8]

Like integers that you could decide to interpret as a memory address and thus use like a char * (char pointer). As in machine code, basically.

C made pointer arithmetics work like array indexing. Also, the combined dereferencing and member lookup operator (->).

[kazinator]

> Also, the combined dereferencing and member lookup operator (->).

That's actually a dud. The motivation was likely caused by the silly choice of the dereference operator being unary/prefix, requiring parentheses in (*ptr).memb.

Compare with Pascal's ptr^.member where no parentheses are required.

But ptr.memb can just work as well as value.memb. The operator statically knows whether the left operand is a pointer to a struct/union or a struct/union value.