Why do we have pointers other than void

Question

I know that we have different pointers like int, float, and char. A void pointer is the only pointer which can hold all o

Answer 1

The compiler needs to know the types pointed at otherwise all sorts of code won't work. Consider the following:

*a = *b + *c;    // Should this add char? int? float?
s_ptr->x = 0;    // How does the compiler know anything about the structure s_ptr points to?
a[5] = 0;        // How far is a[5] from a[0]?

Not having types for pointers would be like not having types for anything. The compiler would be completely lost. In short, C and C++ are both strongly typed and this carries over to pointers for fairly obvious reasons.