What is the real difference between Pointers and References?

Question

AKA - What\'s this obsession with pointers?

Having only really used modern, object oriented languages like ActionScript, Java and C#, I don\'t really understand the

Answer 1

Pointers are important! They "point" to a memory address, and many internal structures are represented as pointers, IE, An array of strings is actually a list of pointers to pointers! Pointers can also be used for updating variables passed to functions.