C is incredibly permissive with regard to its types which are themselves very anemic. With the exception of the numeric primitives, C really only has a single type, the pointer, everything else is just syntactic sugar for various forms of pointer arithmetic. For instance arrays in C are just a shortcut for some pointer plus an offset multiplied by a constant determined at compile time based on what you've claimed is the underlying struct or primitive of the array. Importantly C is perfectly happy to take any random pointer into arbitrary memory and allow you to map any set of offsets into it. It's worth looking at for instance Rust that at least in theory allows the same thing to be done, but only by explicitly opting out of static checks via unsafe declarations. In normal safe code Rust will statically verify that a given reference (pointer more or less) is in fact referring to the type you're code is expecting it to, rather than the C approach of simply assuming the program is correct. Looked at another way, as far as the C compiler is concerned nearly everything is a pointer, and one kind of pointer is entirely exchangeable with another kind of pointer (with at most a cast being required, but probably not even that if it's the entirely too common case of being a void pointer). This is in contrast to nearly every other statically typed language that will either at compile or runtime verify that any given reference is the appropriate type before dereferencing it. C++ nominally at least has a more powerful type system, but since it was designed (in theory at least) as a superset of C, C's permissivity blows a giant gaping hole in its type system.