This would probably cause a compiler error....

But assuming it doesn't the context is p_ch = the bits above... the code declaring p_ch isn't shown but I'm guessing that the value here is actuality a pointer to a pointer so nothing illegal would be happening.

Lastly... C++ is really lacking in guarantees so you can assign a char to the first byte of an integer - C++ doesn't generally care what you do unless you go out of bounds.

The reason I'm casting to void* is just pure comedy.