Yes, but giving each pointer metadata for the goal of saying, at compile time, I can ignore or not certain access patterns in this pointer, is conceptually different (but practically the same, it's just a POV) of saying that a pointer is not just a number. Both ways are ok to represent things, but I've the feeling that saying "a pointer is not just a number" in some way allows the ANSI-C culture of UBs to be culturally validated. Moreover, the definition given in the blog post, is also far from the actual nature of machines, where actually a load/store operation for this number will result in the same operation.