pointer question

[Barry Margolin]

Yes, a pointer is an address, but there are different kinds of
addresses.  Consider a machine where four characters fit into a word,
and one integer fits into a word (remember, this is just a
hypothetical).  Thus, you can reference four times as many characters as
you can integers, so you need at least two more bits in a *char than in
a *int.  On some machines this is not really a problem: normal pointers
are byte pointers, and word pointers are just pointers whose low order
two bits are both zero.  Other machines actually have two different
kinds of pointers.
-- 
			Barry Margolin
			ARPA: barmar at MIT-Multics
			UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar