[stoney]

Exactly. I didn't mean to imply that pointers are evil or should be avoided. That was supposed to be the point of my dynamite analogy, but I guess the comment made elsewhere on this topic about the inadequacies of analogies holds true here.

So, for the avoidance of doubt, I believe: pointers are awesome, powerful tools and you can do some great things in C/C++ using them and I sometimes miss them (a little bit) when using other languages. But you can also do some terrible things with them - and I have done some spectacularly bad things with them in the past. But that doesn't mean they are bad - it just means that I am reckless.

[maranas]

^ Ditto. I thought pointers were being shown in a negative light at first, but now I see the point. In my opinion too, manual memory management is a very important part of developing highly scalable applications, but should only be done if absolutely needed - which is fortunately rarely the case nowadays as most people just develop for the Web, and can afford to throw money at the problem. But for embedded systems where resources are limited and inputs are very limited, it is still very useful. In the early years, it was C + inline assembly for further optimization - where you try your best to avoid assembly. I guess now, it's a dynamic/interpreted language, plus C/C++ for further optimization, and avoid C/C++ like the plague as much as possible.