> If you shove a few extra bits into a pointer, then it can't directly be used to dereference something. In practice it would be what I call an immediate handle

> If you shove a few extra bits into a pointer, then it can't directly be used to dereference something. In practice it would be what I call an immediate handle (a handle that can be resolved to a pointer with a test and simple bitmask) That's just a smart pointer. Unlike a handle, it's anything but opaque. (And in your comment you specifically lumped smart pointers under "pointers" too, so we should be in agreement.) > void* ResolveHandle(handle h); this is the basic API, and it will return nullptr if this handle is not allocated or has been freed. Or it will block if this handle is a promise. Again, there's nothing preventing you from making a smart pointer that does exactly what you're talking about here, which (again) both of us would lump under "pointer". Perhaps worth elaborating on: The concepts of handles and pointers, as I'm talking about them at least, are fairly language-agnostic. What makes a handle a "handle" to me (and I would've thought to you too) isn't the wrapper around it; it's the opaqueness. Not from a mechanical sense (i.e. not the public vs. private or the language syntax, which aren't even relevant in every language) but from an informational sense: whether it can be "dereferenced" without additional information.