Yes, you are. Notwithstanding the fact that C pointers are syntactically not really references, at least in my opinion, the way to spell an example for what th

Yes, you are. Notwithstanding the fact that C pointers are syntactically not really references, at least in my opinion, the way to spell an example for what they are referring to in C would be "pair = foo". You aren't modifying *pair, but the reference object stored in your own private stack frame. As long as mutability is out of the picture and the aptly named notion of referential transparency is preserved, there is no way to discern whether any two symbols reference the same value. The moment you flip the proverbial page to chapter 3 of SICP and start using setter-functions!, you lose this. You should very much become aware of the fact you are working with references whenever you mutate things, because the mental model of lists as values falls apart when you write, for example: (define a (list 1 2 3)) (define b (cdr a)) (set-car! b 'ta-da!) (display a) And then get left to perplexedly stare at the REPL's output. It is true that references are not, in some sense, a language-level/opt-in feature of Scheme, as in that you cannot arbitrarily create a reference to an integer, but cons cells very much are represented by references to them only, in much the same way as class types in Java are.