Why does the arrow (->) operator in C exist?
The article discusses the rationale behind the arrow operator (->) in the C programming language. It explains how C's evolution from earlier languages influenced its treatment of pointers and structures. The piece highlights the inconsistency in how arrays and structs are handled in terms of dereferencing and type information.
- ▪The arrow operator is used to access members of a structure through a pointer.
- ▪C's treatment of arrays and structs differs due to its historical evolution from BCPL and other languages.
- ▪The article questions why C does not apply similar dereferencing logic to structs as it does to arrays.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 26 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Why does the arrow (->) operator in C exist? — Hacker News (Newest)
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Lobsters |
| Canonical URL | https://lobste.rs/s/garq37/why_does_arrow_operator_c_exist |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 03:15:10 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T03:35:03.606Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T03:35:03.606Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | kXTfrepBw3TZ · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This doesn’t really answer the question. In order to dereference a pointer, the * operator needs to know the type of its operand. So C of that era had enough type information to know whether a variable was a pointer or not, and what type it pointed to. So (in theory) it also had enough type information to know whether . should offset (if the left operand is a struct type) or indirect (otherwise). But in practice it didn’t pay attention to types in that manner, because of the way it gradually evolved from BCPL via B and NB. This weirdness is also (weirdly) related to C’s weird treatment of arrays that decay to pointers. In BCPL, when you declare v[10] you get 10 slots for the array elements but also a -1th slot containing pointer to the start of the array (ie, v == &v + 1).
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lobsters.
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