There is a distinction. Lisp machines do not allow function pointers to become data pointers. The C standard accounts for that. Function pointers also have special decay behavior unlike data pointers. You can chain an unlimited number of '*'s and still get a valid function pointer.

  int f(int x) { return x + 1; }

  int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    int (*fp)(int) = f;
    printf("Answer: %d\n", fp(39) + (****fp)(1));
    return 0;
  }