Gotcha. Perhaps the article would be better off using a word like list instead of array, to avoid the additional semantics that C attaches to that word.
In any case, I think I agree that dereferencing an address should return the byte to the right for the reason that you mention. That's a solid point, and I totally didn't think of that :) That's a really important property of the dereferencing operation.
I still feel like that doesn't make the mental model of memory-addresses-are-gaps-between-bytes any less valuable, though, nor does it mean that abstractions built on top of this memory model need to use the same conventions as the underlying system - that's the point of abstractions, after all :)
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Gotcha. Perhaps the article would be better off using a word like list instead of array, to avoid the additional semantics that C attaches to that word.
In any case, I think I agree that dereferencing an address should return the byte to the right for the reason that you mention. That's a solid point, and I totally didn't think of that :) That's a really important property of the dereferencing operation.
I still feel like that doesn't make the mental model of memory-addresses-are-gaps-between-bytes any less valuable, though, nor does it mean that abstractions built on top of this memory model need to use the same conventions as the underlying system - that's the point of abstractions, after all :)