Sorry, I forgot to say that you can store or retrieve data of any type, simply casting the pointer. For example:

int x;
x= *(((int *) eeprom) + 10);

reads the 10th integer in a table starting at eeprom. The cast is applied to eeprom before adding 10, so that 10 means 10 integers (2-bytes size each). Therefore that statement should be equivalent to:
x= eeprom[10];
if eeprom were defined as a pointer to an integer.

Regards,

Alfredo del Rio.