[roelschroeven]

Isn't it still the model that is exposed to the programmer, even though internally all kinds of things are going on to make it all go faster? For example, nowadays many/most processors have separate caches for instructions and data, meaning that they strictly speaking don't conform to the Von Neumann architecture. But the programmer doesn't see the different caches, ideally doesn't even see the cache at all.

It's like the execution model, where processors do a lot of out-of-order execution, but do a lot of work so they can present a model to the programmer as if everything happens in-order.

[kasey_junk]

That depends on the architecture, the os, the compiler & the runtime.

Part of the confusion in teaching pointers (I think) is that we act like they are a lower level abstraction than they are (because they used to be). On modern commodity hardware with mainstream languages pointers have very little to do with memory addresses. Accessing memory via them will not happen in constant time, they may or may not perform better when used, even if the language doesn’t copy them on use the OS or processor might etc.

I just find when I try to teach people the memory address model of pointers there are so many exceptions that the model isn’t helpful. Like the OP I struggle with an alternative.