I am watching a video on pointers and memory and I'm confused because I thought memory addresses are 1 byte but in the video he is saying they are 32-bits (4 bytes) and that if we had int a = 2 it would be stored in one memory address, but wouldn't an integer be stored across 4 separate memory addresses since they are a maximum 4 bytes long?

CodePudding user response：

A pointer points to a single byte. When you're storing something larger than a byte, it's spread across multiple consecutive bytes, and the pointer points to the first of these bytes. The compiled code uses instructions that can read and write multiple bytes from memory to process the whole thing.

So you're correct, a 32-bit integer will be stored in 4 separate (but consecutive) memory locations.

This is why we have to declare the types of pointers in C. When you derefence the pointer, the type is used to determine how many bytes to read or write starting at that address.