Yes, it refers to a memory location, without implying anything about the semantics of the bits located at that location. You can't dereference or assign to the location because you don't know the type at that location. You can however assign that pointer to a typed pointer variable to actually read or write to that memory location. This is useful when you really care about the bits of memory but you're variable pointing to that memory could just as well be an (int64_t ) as a (char ) and those types are not interchangeable with each other, only with (void ). So library functions that just care about memory locations, not the semantics of the bits there, take (void ).

Some of this may be technically incorrect. This is my own mental model of the C language which is sometimes incomplete.