Comment by gnode

Pointers, as a language concept, don't have to correspond to the addressing schemes of the hardware or ISA. On some architectures instructions may only be able to address aligned whole words. Some microcontrollers (e.g. Intel MCS-51) feature bit-addressable memory. Apparently, there's a special __bit type supported by the Small Device C Compiler for using bit addressable memory on such devices, although I don't know if it has support for taking pointers to these.