Are all data pointers the same size in one platform for all data types?

Question

Are char*, int*, long* or even long long* of same size (on a given platform)?

Answer 1

Generally yes, All pointers to anything, whether they point to a int or a long or a string or an array of strings or a function, point to a single memory address, which is the same size on a machine. That is because the Processer on a machine has a an address register that these pointers are loaded into, and the size of that address register controls the size of the pointers.

The only exception might be in cases like old Intel 8088 16-bit machines where there was a two step process to determine the memory address, involving a 16 bit segment pointer, (which identified a 64K block of memory within the 1MByte address space), and then a second 16 bit memory address to identify the specific memory address within that segment. These two 16 bit addresses were then combined to get the complete 20 bit memory address. In that scenario, then, I imagine it might be possible to distinquiah between the individual 16 bit addresses, and the combined 20-bit address.