The ISO C standard does not specify the semantics of many valid programs that use non-portable idioms such as integer-pointer casts. Recent efforts at formal definitions and verified implementation of the C language inherit this feature. By adopting high-level abstract memory models, they validate common optimizations. On the other hand, this prevents reasoning about much low-level code relying on the behavior of common implementations, where formal verification has many applications. We

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... the first formal memory model that allows many common optimizations and fully supports operations on the representation of pointers. All arithmetic operations are well-defined for pointers that have been cast to integers. Crucially, our model is also simple to understand and program with. All our results are fully formalized in Coq.