In some cases, we are only interested in the memory address itself, and we might just want to pass that address around, for example to a function that doesn’t care how the data itself is arranged.

Python, JavaScript & C++ examples - Void function, Functions in Programming that require or return a Value discussed in brief for beginners.

In the case of cynth, each C function creates a Verilog module that has the same arguments as the function along with another argument to stand in for the return value, if any.