note 105549 rejected from language.references.whatare by danbrown

Note Submitter: pvbemmel at xs4all dot nl ---- The only explanation offered by the text is that "they are symbol table aliases" . This really needs more explanation. Isn't a symbol table alias something like a key (or index?) into a symbol table , and as such, can be thought of as a pointer into the symbol table? The phrase "They are not like C pointers" doesn't provide much clarity. Java pointers (i.e. variables of type "reference to object") in one respect are not like C pointers: Java pointers have no pointer arithmetic. Yet in all other aspects, it helps to think of them as C pointers , to understand how they behave. The phrase "in PHP, variable name and variable content are different" doesn't distinguish PHP references from Pascal, C, C++, or Java : there there is also distinction between name and value. "The closest analogy is with Unix filenames and files" ... really makes me wonder. Are we dealing with a language here that defines references differently from what has come before, 50 years of procedural languages?