[cygwin98]

I believe there is a difference between knowing how memory and pointers work and being proficient at pointer manipulation in C.

If you enforce such kind of interviews in C, you will miss lots of great FP programmers. Maybe you don't care anyway.

[pjscott]

I would bet that people who are good at working with pointers in C are drastically over-represented among great functional programmers, so you won't actually lose that many.