That would work in Java. In C is a bit complicated as you can have pointers with byte granularity. In principle the size of a pointer need not be the same for all types: you can have char, short, int and float pointers be 64 bits and everything else be 32 bits. (void has to be 64 bit as well as you must be able to round trip through it). I suspect that would break 90% of code out there though.