[gengkev]

As I responded to another commenter, the purpose of "char * p" might simply be to indicate the type of p, not necessarily to indicate that it is uninitialized. If you wanted to indicate the type of p, what would you write instead?

Regarding pointers, though, you have a point that char * is commonly used for statically allocated strings. I concede that it's fair to criticize the interviewee for saying the memory was dynamically allocated (by the compiler??), though I don't know if that rises to the level of "Get out."

[Klockan]

> If you wanted to indicate the type of p, what would you write instead?

Then you would just write it as a function like this:

    void foo(char *p) {
        *p = 'a';
    }