> You need to make sure you don't lose track of any of them. This is a fair point, but note that in any memory management scheme except garbage collected, you

> You need to make sure you don't lose track of any of them. This is a fair point, but note that in any memory management scheme except garbage collected, you run the risk of having a dangling reference if you use direct pointers to other nodes. At least with node identifiers, you can safely check that the other node still exists, in any memory management scheme.