Once upon a time... We had 8 bit microprocessors and everyone wrote in assembly. Most processors included some type of indirect addressing used for jump tables and kernels. When higher level languages came along we add a thin layer of abstraction and called them pointers. Over the years we have gotten more and more away from the hardware. This is not necessarily a bad thing. They are called higher level languages for a reason. The more I can concentrate on what I want to do instead of the details of how it is done the better.
