Can you elaborate?

My point is that the concepts "having a datatype, that stores an address" and "reading (typed) data stored at a specific address" are different, but share the same keyword (which is in this case just one symbol - maybe because C programmers have to use it often).

E.g. assuming C99's bool (0|1) datatype, you might define the "negate" functionality, which is often done by '!'. So we have something like that:

  // init a new bool
  bool success = 1;
  ...
  // negate the bool
  if (!success) {
    ...
  }

For me that makes sense. However if we take the pointer approach (as it is implemented), it would look like this:

  // init a new bool
  bool success = 1;
  ...
  // negate the bool
  if (bool success) {
    ...
  }

I hope this makes sense. For an experienced programmer * 's role is obvious from the context, but for me that was the most troubling concept when starting with C's pointers.