Mmm. Be careful --- I've been programming in C for years, including frickin' K&R C, and I'd probably say something like A here (although instead of 'memory' I'd probably have said 'it points at whatever you set it to, what do you mean?').
The reasoning is: the code as written makes no sense; therefore it's incomplete. Obviously, then, it's not intended to be read literally, and is just an abbreviated portion of the real code. The first line just declares p as a pointer. The second line dereferences the pointer. The pointer assignment has been elided for brevity and is not relevant to this question.
That's an expectation impedance mismatch. I'm expecting you to want a high level description of how pointers work. You're expecting me to provide a blow-by-blow machine level breakdown of the instructions involved.
(Also, the blank line enforced by HN between paragraphs really doesn't help here.)
The reasoning is: the code as written makes no sense; therefore it's incomplete. Obviously, then, it's not intended to be read literally, and is just an abbreviated portion of the real code. The first line just declares p as a pointer. The second line dereferences the pointer. The pointer assignment has been elided for brevity and is not relevant to this question.
That's an expectation impedance mismatch. I'm expecting you to want a high level description of how pointers work. You're expecting me to provide a blow-by-blow machine level breakdown of the instructions involved.
(Also, the blank line enforced by HN between paragraphs really doesn't help here.)