Modern programming languages tend to neglect pointers and in the case of Java, pointers are completely absent. Pascal provides an excellent environment to understand and utilize pointers which can be applied in DOS, Unix and many other operating systems and different languages.
Most people are familiar with normal data types like integer, real, string and arrays.
This gives them the flexibility to hold any data quantity as long as the size of the data type and a free memory location has been provided. Another important difference is the fact that memory allocated for pointer variables is separate from normal variables. Imagine a large chunk of memory divided into two segments, one of them being small. The smaller segment is used to store normal variables while the remaining part of the memory is used for the pointers that the programmer uses. The identifier for a pointer type is established in a TYPE declaration section.