Pointers are super hard if you've not dealt with indirection before. Especially in C/C++ when you can dereference pretty much anything and you get a runtime seg

Pointers are super hard if you've not dealt with indirection before. Especially in C/C++ when you can dereference pretty much anything and you get a runtime segfault with no other diagnostic. Do you not remember when that was mystifying? Given that a huge fraction of vulnerabilities are unsafe memory accesses, I think most people still make plenty of mistakes around pointers. The analogy I like is the address of IHOP (International House of Pancakes). If I know the address of IHOP is 4567 Portobello Rd., why don't I have pancakes?!? It's the same with a pointer. Similarly, if I have a pancake, and someone calls and asks me for the address of IHOP, it's also wrong to bring the pancake to them in lieu of the address.