[Twey]

But my bitstring representation of a heap may not be your bitstring representation of the same heap. Neither C nor C++ makes enough guarantees about the representation of the heap that you can assume that, so a higher-level ‘heap’ type that abstracts over the respective representations of my heap and your heap is inevitable, and not something to be scared of. Of course you can reasonably ask for a language in which the representation of a heap is uniform across hardware, but it will come with some performance penalties.

Everything on the computer can be _represented as_ a bit string. But it's important not to confuse that fact with everything on the computer _being_ a bit string. The bit string is only a ‘name’ to represent the thing in conversation between people who share an understanding of what that representation should represent.