Address and Indirection Operators

Description

The operand of the unary indirection operator (*) must be a pointer to type T. The resulting type is T. If type T is not a function type, the unary-expression is an lvalue.

The contents of pointers are memory addresses. No range checking is done on indirection operations. Specifically, storing values indirectly through a pointer that was not correctly initialized can cause bounds errors or destruction of valid data.

The operand of the unary address-of operator (&) must be a function designator or an lvalue. This precludes taking the address of constants (for example, &3), because 3 is not an lvalue. If the type of the operand is T, the result of the address of operator is a pointer to type T. The & operator may not be applied to bit fields or objects with the register storage class.

It is always true that if E is an lvalue, then *&E is an lvalue expression equal to E.