more of ncurses

Hi, I just saw a few statements taken out of the ncurses-programming-howto which confused me a little... I am doing a menu and for a menu you are asked to keep a static array of pointers (that should be available as long as your menu is posted).. and then using a function you link items array of pointers to the previously created array.. Now if you just link pointers, or better said just assign them the value of other pointers, what need do you have to get memory for them: my_items= (ITEM **)calloc(5, sizeof(ITEM *)); Arent pointers treated like the rest of the common data type in the sense that memory for them is assigned automatically ? Or am I misunderstanding something ? Thanks, Raul