Or, well, pointers are intrinsic to computer science, but not in any special way. No more than the un-numbered current position of the Turing tape machine along

Or, well, pointers are intrinsic to computer science, but not in any special way. No more than the un-numbered current position of the Turing tape machine along the tape, or whatever. We give a lot of attention to pointers because electronic computers feature random access memory consisting of small, equal-sized cells of bits, keyed by binary numbers.