I think that the main problem is that pointers are a too low-level concept (like assembly language compared to high-level programming languages) that are used t

I think that the main problem is that pointers are a too low-level concept (like assembly language compared to high-level programming languages) that are used to implement various more high-level concepts. I have not come across a language that does have pointers (some functional languages lack pointers all together) and has these high-level concepts. There is a great difference between a pointer that points to a complex value and a pointer, that like a database cursor, points to a certain part in a complex value, either with the purpose to query this value or to make some change to the value.