My guess is, people are trying to keep variables the primary concept, and explain pointers on top of that. Hence, ‘boxes’ again crop up in an explanation of poi

My guess is, people are trying to keep variables the primary concept, and explain pointers on top of that. Hence, ‘boxes’ again crop up in an explanation of pointers. For me, everything became much more clear when I realized that the heap memory stands on its own as a concept, being a big pile of bytes instead of ‘boxes’—and implicit allocation/deallocation of variables is just a thin veil on top (muddying the matter somewhat since vars can themselves be stored in memory and point to it). Guess I had to deal with OOP before I grokked all the pointer-juggling going on behind the scenes.