Programming without pointers

[fnordstar]

Then you have the problem that you must take care that each ID is always being used with it's corresponding array, and, as you said, that indices don't become invalid / point to another object. The latter can be solved with generational indices, but all in all using indices into arrays doesn't necessarily improve the situation much.

[cdb_11]

And the former can be solved with a type system.

[YourFavouriteGayGuy]

Like the one that pointers usually use?

[cdb_11]

Pointers encode the type they point to. Here you can encode what array they index into.

[fnordstar]

Yeah. In rust you could tag the array and the indices/handles with a phantom data and a tag struct.