>>22
C pointers have no overhead to speak of, so they're very fast and efficient. That's their quality, it makes them good for realtime processing or intensive applications where efficiency matters more than speed of coding. For the rest, there are intelligent pointer classes (eg boost's), and garbage collection.
I just wrote a decent post on /prog/ and I f e e l k i n d o f b a d a b o u t i t :-(