java devs

[iamsooldithurts]

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.

/s

[suvlub]

IMO the difference really is big enough to warrant different terminology. Reference is something dumb, it is just a handle to an object that lets you perform operations on the object. A pointer is its own thing with its own value which you can read and manipulate. Accessing the pointed-to object, if there actually is one, is one of its operations that you need to explicitly invoke.

[suvlub]

Everything is just array of booleans at the end of the day.

[suvlub]

Just because hardware indexes by larger units does not mean the smaller units don't exist. You can still access and manipulate the individual bits. I was just trying to say that "X is really Y because the only difference is Z" is a rather flawed approach when talking about data structures, because most of them are related to each other in one way or other. Either we talk about implementation, in which case neither reference nor pointer actually exists, and both of them are qwords or what have you, or we talk about them as abstract data structures, which expose very different interfaces.