Hi Kairui, On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 3:15 AM Kairui Song <ryncsn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Chris > > Hi, Chris and Matthew. > > Thanks for the comments. > > Right, it's just a language syntax level thing, since "->" have a > higher priority, so in the syntax level it is doing a member access > first, then take the address. By C definition member access should > not happen if the object is invalid (NULL). Only a hypothesis problem > on paper... The dereference only shows up in the abstract syntax tree level. According to the C standard there are expansion and evaluation phases after that. At the evaluation phase the dereference will turn into pointer arithmetic. Per my understanding, the dereference never actually happens, due to the evaluation rules, not even in theory. > This is indeed not needed since in reality it's just pointer > arithmetic. I'm OK dropping this. Thanks Chris