Perhaps from the programmers perspective but surely pointers were used
    "under the hood".  There is simply no way that I can thik of to perform
    array and string operations without pointers.

No, no.  Those things used "under the hood" are ADDRESSES, without which you
can't do much of anything (no jumps or calls, for instance.)  A "pointer" is
a particular implementation of an address-like capability in a high level
language, and that's quite different.  When you talk about "Joe the Dense"
not understaning "pointers", you're almost certainly talking about the HLL
definition - he may or may not understand "addresses."  (I did mention being
comfortable with assembly language pointers for quite some time before
connecting them with HLL pointers, right?  Perhaps the difficulties some
people have with pointers is BECAUSE many HLLs do such a good job hiding any
need for them...)

Pointers in C, of course, have semantics, capabilities, and quirks that
extend their incomprehensibility far beyond those of other languages, not to
mention the fact that they're NECESSARY so often.  Fortunately, there are
tools you can use if you have to define a pointer to a function that returns
a pointer to a function or similar :-)`

BillW

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