[saagarjha]

You can consider the entire virtual memory space to be a big vector, where a pointer is just an index into it!

[jstimpfle]

However that's a pretty poor vector. It's not homogeneous (you put things of different shapes inside). That also implies you need sophisticated memory management, leading to further overheads. You cannot meaningfully iterate it.

[saagarjha]

I was mostly joking…

[jstimpfle]

Yes and I'm serious :-)

[photon-torpedo]

Yes, that's exactly how we do it in Fortran 77.