[dgb23]

Without pointers in some form or another, you can’t refer to allocated memory. You can change the name of pointers but they are still pointers.

[thayne]

It is possible to write complex and performant programs without allocating memory.

And in some languages, where you only operate on values, and never worry about where something is stored, allocation is just an implementation detail.

[dgb23]

> It is possible to write complex and performant programs without allocating memory.

I assume you mean by only allocating on the stack? Those are still allocations. It's just someone else doing it for you.

> And in some languages, where you only operate on values, and never worry about where something is stored, allocation is just an implementation detail.

Again, that's someone else deciding what to allocate where and how to handle the pointers etc. Don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate FP, as long as I do information processing, but alot of programming doesn't deal in abstract values but in actual memory, for example functional programming language compilers.

[ahoka]

That's... not true?

Example in C:

void fun(void) {

    int a[16];

    for (int i = 0; i < sizeof(a); i++)
    {
        a[i] = 1;
    }

}

I have allocated and referred to memory without pointers here.

[defrost]

in some form or another is the key to their point.

Here's something to try at home .. exactly your code save for this change:

    i[a] = 1;

... guess what, still compiles, still works !!

WTF ??? you ask, well, you see, X[Y] is just syntactic sugar for X+Y - it's a pointer operation disguised to look like a rose (but it smells just the same).