I always wanted to know what is the real thing difference of how the compiler see a pointer to a struct (in C suppose) and a struct itself.

struct person p;
struct person *pp;

pp->age, I always imagine that the compiler does: "value of pp + offset of atribute "age" in the struct".

But what it does with person.p? It would be almost the same. For me "the programmer", p is not a memory address, its like "the structure itself", but of course this is not how the compiler deal with it.

My guess is it's more of a syntactic thing, and the compiler always does (&p)->age.

I'm correct?