What's the position of pointers

[Richard Bos]

Or without a debugger. One might want a debugger to show how your
local implementation does things; one doesn't need one to explain
what they /mean/. (This is especially useful when it means one isn't
having to explain a debugger at the same time as a programming
language.)

I would go so far as to say that someone who needs to use a debugger to
either teach, or understand, the fundamentals of pointer usage, neither
does nor will understand pointers. A pointer, despite frequent
protestations to the contrary, is neither a number nor a one-up-one-down
"address". It's an address in the full, complex meaning of that term: it
can contain one or several parts, several of them may or may not follow
up on one another despite what the number(s) in one (or more) of the
parts say, and looking at how they're written down does not make you
understand how they work.
This is as true for pointers as for street addresses. Anyone expecting
to be near Great Ormond Street Hospital because he's on Great Guildford
Street (which backs on (non-"Great") Guildford Street) in London is
quite mistaken; and anyone who expects 03:acc8:04bf to be "close",
whatever that means, to 02:acc8:04bf, or even to be the "equivalent",
whatever _that_ may be, of 03:acc8:04bf in Security Section 02, is
equally as mistaken.

(_Implementing_ pointers is another matter, of course. That's inherently
platform-specific - highly so, in fact - and in that case, a debugger is
a very useful tool indeed.)

Richard