Null, void, wild, dangling in core C. DOS also had far, near. I believe one of the Windows Visual something platforms had extensions that added another three or four.

I'll bite. So null is just a special value one can assign to a pointer, marking it not used. In Go this is nil. Void means "absence of type" and is related to pointers only marginally - void* is a pointer to something we don't know a type of. In Go, I guess a pointer to interface{} would be the same? (Not quite, but close)

As for wild and dangling pointers (I would argue the are the same - pointers that show somewhere they shouldn't), fair point. Of course one would expect this from a language so many decades younger.

But none of these are pointer "types" (far and near arguably are - iirc they determine the size of a pointer - but these four are not). I hope the question on the interviews are posed differently, I for one wouldn't know what you mean.

> As for wild and dangling pointers (I would argue the are the same - pointers that show somewhere they shouldn't), fair point. Of course one would expect this from a language so many decades younger.

It’s not due to age, but due to having a GC and being a managed language. I really don’t get all the comparisons of Go to C, the former seems to want to sell itself as a modern C replacement but they are nowhere in the same niche (and that’s ok, there are very few places where a GC can’t work). They just operate by completely different semantics when it comes to pointers.

I love Golang but its pointers are awful. "Nil is not really Nil" has tripped >1M Go programmers. It's the "trillion dollar" mistake.

People make fun out of C++ all the time. Yet, Go has some extraordinary Gotchas of its own. You need to read "The Go Bestiary" to make sure you don't blow your head off.