I learned C in my freshman year of college where we used K&R as our text book. This was 1989, so that text and our professor were my only source of information.

But, luckily, I had been programming for about six years on a PET, TRS-80, and Commodore 64. It was on that last computer that I learned 6502 Assembly. I had been experimenting with sound generation, and I needed more performance.

This was my first instance where Knowing Assembly Language Helps a Little.

When we got to pointers in the C class, the professor described it as the memory address of a variable. That’s all I needed to know. In Assembly, memory addresses are a first-class concept. I had a book called Mapping the Commodore 64 that told you what was at each ROM address. Doing pointer arithmetic is a common Assembly coding task. You can’t do anything interesting without understanding addresses.

So, I guess that I learned about C pointers at some point in my learning of 6502 Assembly. Since C maps to Assembly, by the time we got to it, it felt natural to me. If you are having trouble with the concept, I’d try to write simple Assembly programs. Try an emulator of 6502, and not, for example, something modern. Modern instructions are not designed for humans to code easily, but older ones took that into account a little more.