Ironically Assembly is safer than C and languages that descend from it, because although CPUs might have undefined behaviour when given undocumented opcodes, or operation modes, the CPU doesn't rewrite your code without telling you about it.
Interestingly although all of C's other types are in fact just the machine integers wearing funny hats (e.g. char is just either a signed or unsigned byte depending on platform, float is just the 32-bit unsigned integers as binary fractions) the pointers are not actually just integers.
They could be, but it's much worse from a performance perspective if you just have these raw machine addresses rather than the pointers in the C language so actual C compilers haven't done that for many years. ISO/IEC TS 6010 describes the best current attempt to come up with coherent semantics for these pointers, or here's a Rustier perspective https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2020/12/14/provenance.html [today Rust specifically says its pointers have provenance and what that means, like that TS for the C language]
> float is just the 32-bit unsigned integers as binary fractions
Note that float and double are a bit particular because they can use different registers! But yeah, when stored in memory they are the same 32/63 bit integers.
The term was introduced so long ago, it's basically prehistoric now. Pointers are needed only for system programming language, they can be absent in systems programming language.
