As you say using it early into an intro programming class may be a mistake, but it's soon useful in that you can say 'don't dereference b, it might be null' ins

As you say using it early into an intro programming class may be a mistake, but it's soon useful in that you can say 'don't dereference b, it might be null' instead of something like 'don't attempt to read the data located at address b, b might be a null pointer'. Are you sure about 'referencing' though? I've never heard it in this context. It could be confusing given how C++ has references has well.