A slight tangent, but something that surprised me: The [] operator literally is just syntactic sugar for pointer dereferencing and addition, so that the following equivalence holds:

  a[b] == *(a + b);

The surprising consequence of this is that the following is legal:

  int foo[] = { 1, 2, 3 };
  int bar = 2[foo]; /* yes, this evaluates to 3 */

because

  *(2 + foo)

is legal, and + is commutative. This works for both pointers and arrays. I haven't worked out a practical use, though I suspect the C++ metaprogramming crowd might have. Obviously the equivalence only holds on the native types in C++ as [], + and * can each be separately overloaded.