I think people get scared of pointers because the numbers are big and are in hexadecimal. But they don't have to be. I didn't understand pointers until I thou

I think people get scared of pointers because the numbers are big and are in hexadecimal. But they don't have to be. I didn't understand pointers until I thought of them as house numbers in postal addresses. In a world where everyone lives on the same street, you can send anyone a letter by mailing a letter with their house number written on the envelope. You don't even need to know their name -- thus SPAM mail is born. The same analogy holds for phone numbers. The pointer is like a phone number or house number. The person on the other end is the value you get when you dereference a pointer.