For example, in an Intel 8086, as well as in later processors running 16-bit code, a far pointer has two parts: a 16-bit segment value, and a 16-bit offset value.
A linear address is obtained by shifting the binary segment value four times to the left, and then adding the offset value.
To compare two far pointers, they must first be converted (normalized) to their linear representation.
On C compilers targeting the 8086 processor family, far pointers were declared using a non-standard far qualifier; e.g., char far *p; defined a far pointer to a char.
The difficulty of normalizing far pointers could be avoided with the non-standard huge qualifier.