On Tuesday, 2 April 2013 at 02:52:48 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

You see, indexing does NOT dereference the pointer, it's an index for that pointer.  c[0] means *(c + 0).  A pointer is essentially an unchecked slice, with undefined length.  This is how it works in C also.

c[1] is the same as *(c + 1), completely consistent (and also sets b to 42, 42)

OK, I think I see where I went astray. I was a case of bad induction from a few tests :-)
So, I guess what is happening is the following, right?

    int[2] a;

    int[2] *c;
    c = &a;

    c[0] = 7;  // same thing as below
    a = 7;      // same thing above