In designing a new programming language, is it safe to assume that a C int and a pointer are the same size on the machine?
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In designing a new programming language, is it safe to assume that a C int and a pointer are the same size on the machine?
No. A pointer may be larger or smaller than an integer in size. If you need to pass a pointer as an integer for some reason (like performing integer, rather than pointer, arithmetic), they are guaranteed to fit into an intptr_t.
They are not guaranteed to fit into a size_t as suggested in another answer, but in practice it is unlikely that they won’t, since the largest addressable size is usually equal to the largest addressable address.