alt Hacker News> pointers are real
Pointers are an abstraction that are no more or less real than any other abstraction. They belong to particular languages, but they are not intrinsic to computer science as such as if they were some kind of atomic construct of the field.
> you can't just put a LISP book on top of an x86 chip [...the rest is confusing...]
I'm not talking about what, in today's contingent market and incidental state of the art, is practical. Obviously, if you want to run any program in any language, you have to target some architecture. The point is that the architecture is utterly incidental as far as the language per se is concerned. Lisp is not "less real" because you need to translate it into machine code. The machine code of a particular architecture is only there to simulate Lisp on that architecture. You can in principle have different architectures with their own machine code that can be used to simulate the very same Lisp.
> Computer science is, to be honest, not interesting or useful without a machine to use it on.
Computer science is very interesting without a machine, but how interesting you find it is neither here nor there. The point isn't to do away with machines, or that the machine has no practical importance. The point is to say that the machine is only a tool, and not the subject matter of computer science.
Or, well, pointers are intrinsic to computer science, but not in any special way. No more than the un-numbered current position of the Turing tape machine along the tape, or whatever.
We give a lot of attention to pointers because electronic computers feature random access memory consisting of small, equal-sized cells of bits, keyed by binary numbers.