Reference Type and Operation

Abstract

After reaching the halfway point in this book, have you finally hit the wall on still trying to figure out how the language gets away without pointers? Array slices, databases that can insert and delete entries provide some clever ways to avoid them, but at some point some of the data structures will need to have a pointer to another structure. But how would that work with the strict typing? Some complex data types have a real need for selecting between multiple other complex data types, such as building a relational database or even trying to determine which table of strings to scan based upon a match protocol field in header analysis. Welcome to the need for references.