It's the abstraction that's difficult to get in the first place. In Basic, a variable represents at the same time the data and its memory address, the two conce

It's the abstraction that's difficult to get in the first place. In Basic, a variable represents at the same time the data and its memory address, the two concepts are not separated. When you introduce pointers, you split that concept in two: address and data, and to complicate you say address is some form of data. In Basic, the variables are the memory. Each variable you manipulate is equivalent to a piece of memory you can store things in or get things out. With pointers, you loose that equivalence: memory becomes invisible through the code. I can have a memory block that exists in my memory that is no longer pointed by any variable. This means that you get a separation between the way memory is and the way the code looks like. What is difficult when learning pointers is to get that extra level of abstraction: you have to look at the code as an access route to the memory, not as the memory itself.