[jstimpfle]

TBH, I found the low-level pointer stuff to be inaccessible. There is so much magic going on behind the scenes, and on the other hand it's hard to do pointer value arithmetic as well as pointer type arithmetic (you need to create aliases to no end). C is much more convenient for dealing with pointers, and it makes it much more obvious what happens from reading the code.

In Delphi culture, people say PChar instead of char* , and make tons of PFoo and PPFoo. And I think the reason is that some syntactical restrictions made Pascal easier to implement back in its time (last I checked there were still significant restrictions in Delphi)