Is the sizeof(some pointer) always equal to four?

Question

For example: sizeof(char*) returns 4. As does int*, long long*, everything that I\'ve tried. Are there any exceptions to this?

Answer 1

In addition to the 16/32/64 bit differences even odder things can occur.

There have been machines where sizeof(int *) will be one value, probably 4 but where sizeof(char *) is larger. Machines that naturally address words instead of bytes have to "augment" character pointers to specify what portion of the word you really want in order to properly implement the C/C++ standard.

This is now very unusual as hardware designers have learned the value of byte addressability.