Originally Posted by
grumpy
I've yet to see any people (except one or two arguing for it here) describing a "pointer to value". More significantly, I've yet to encounter a programming language that requires, or even encourages, people to think that way.
Under the assumption that my observations support a more general conclusion, I will continue.
Compilers are often designed so they are quite pedantic in their interpretation of a programming language, ignorant of the intent of a programmer, and emit both verbose and cryptic error messages when they fail to understand code they are given. For this reason, it is usually a good idea for the programmer to describe things in a manner consistent with how things are described in their programming language of choice - it makes communication with the compiler easier. Similarly, when communicating with other people who use a programming language, it is also a good idea to describe things in a manner consistent with that programming language. Particularly as one cannot always be certain that another programmer speaks the same human language (English, german, russian, etc).
On that basis, I would suggest describing something as "pointer to value" rather than "pointer to type" and "pointer contains address of value" is absurd.