<< Patterns or ideals or thingamajigs or whatever don't do anything. They exist, or so I claim. Much less do they determine our behavior in any anthropomorphic sense, but you can use them as guideposts if you wish. Ogg did. >>
Dan Minuette caught this, I'm not so sure others have, especially those not experienced with programming. A pointer is a variable that holds a memory address or "container" for a value that can be a number or a word or whatever else a contiguous set of memory addresses can signify. You can "de-reference" a pointer by changing the contents of the pointer itself to point to a different memory address. In the snippet above, I referenced and then dereferenced the words [3 and 4 times, even] that signify "ideal" by saying, "patterns, or ideals, or thingamajigs, or whatever". This "proves" that the object exists and that it exists separately from the pointer, though some pointers feel more appropriate than others. I'm awesome.
