For some reason I also found pointer/references easy in Pascal, but struggle with them in C. I also find it easier to work with direct/indirect addressing in assembler than in C. I'm not entirely sure why - seemingly the differences between C and Pascal syntax and behavior for references seem trivial -- and yet somehow in Pascal it feels intuitive, while in C it feels complicated.
If I recall correctly (long long time ago) there was only one pointer type un Pascal and it was considered a number that it was legal to modify without warnings.
C insists that int * , char * and int are totally different types that you should not mix. It makes sense most of the time but it can be confusing when you do not realize that internally they typically are the same thing <insert here the disclaimer about 32/64 bits systems>.
I think it seems simpler because Pascal differentiates the type ^integer (“pointer to integer”) from the expression i^ (“dereference i”) and didn’t originally have an address-of operator—you could only get the address of a new anonymous value.
