That's a good point - if I am following correctly, a memcpy of a byte from an integer can be regarded as an arithmetical operation (in fact, a multiplicative one), while, in general, there is no equivalent interpretation for copying a byte of a pointer.

I guess one could make a similar argument for the bytes of a unicode string.

While writing this, it occurred to me that the difficulties with casting between pointers and integers is in going from integers to pointers, where there is no unique mapping (for pointer to integer, base + offset is meaningful, but it loses information.)