Ok, a realistic example:   On an imagined architecture, addresses can be automatically multiplied by a power-of-two factor, when dereferencing. And postincrementing and decrementing variables by 1 (but not by 8) can be done as part of another instruction.   Then a C++ implementation could decide to store (double*) as the address divided by 8. Post-increment and decrement would be just a change by 1 and the factor 8 is 2 ^3.   Whenever this pointer is converted to (void*) its address is multiplied by 8 (leftshifted by 3). If (void*) is converted back to (double*) the address is divided by 8.   The roundtrip from double* to void* to double* keeps the pointer value intact. But only, if it is aligned correctly.     With this example I show, which freedoms implementers have, that those freedoms could be beneficial on certain architectures in regards to performance and code size.   There has to be a good reason to take away that freedom and also to lower C++ unto a level, which would have been implementation details up till now.   Perhaps the same (what you want) can be achieved with higher-level tools or interfaces provided into the language.