[catblast]

The difference between pointers and references can easily become muddled. If you have a language with pointers that are non-nullable, type- and memory-safe, is that not high-level?

I think a good real-world example that exposes the problem in your definition is Go. Go has pointers, using them is normal. However, go does not pointer arithmetic and outside of unsafe (like Rust) they are memory safe. I consider golang to be higher level than C/C++ for this reason, and many others (GC, channels, defer, etc, etc) -- I'd also consider it lower-level because of its non-answer/cop-out to error-handling.

But what is special about pointers compared to references? If you have a language with pointers that are type-safe and memory-safe how is this distinctive?

[eximius]

I mean, even Python has references to variables. You can't escape references (as opposed to values).

The difference is one of model. Pointers are an exposure of the underlying computer architecture. Whereas references are more of a property of common language design. In theory, you could not have pointers but still have references.

[catblast]

> Pointers are an exposure of the underlying computer architecture. Whereas references are more of a property of common language design.

Sorry, I just don't follow. How are the pointers in Go more exposing of the underlying architecture than a reference? (I'm using Go as an example to make it concrete, but any language with similar properties will do).

The syntax and some of the semantics of assignment and rebinding are different between say go pointers and python references, but that's the point I'm contesting, I don't see how one is necessarily higher level than the other. If you put automatic memory management, null pointer checks, removal of any "undefined behavior", pointers aren't necessarily low-level. It wasn't the pointer, it was the memory safety.

I personally think that once you tease it out that it becomes a semantics argument that unfortunately doesn't shed much light on what is "high-level".

[nyanpasu64]

I feel that defer is lower-level than C++ RAII which happens automatically in destructors without manually specifying. C has compiler-specific defers, and you can emulate defer using C++ RAII (though clunky).