In C, if I cast & dereference a pointer, does it matter which one I do first?

Question

In C, you can cast both simple data types like int, float, and pointers to these.

Now I would have assumed that if you want to convert from

Answer 1

If you dereference first, cast to int later, you will get the usual (truncation) behavior of casts from float to int. If you cast to pointer to int first, then dereference, the behaviour isn't defined by the standard. Usually it manifests in interpreting the memory that contains the float as int. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008 for how that works out.