Pointers

What's the deal with ''pointers´´?

(&(*((char*)&why)))[0]

Please explain what's the deal with pointers.

Pointers are awesome and you do need them. Let me tell you some of the cool shit you can do with pointers:
* Completely dynamic code-base -- use pointers for all your functions and arbitrarily set them at run-time to point to new functions. This allows for a kind of plugin system.
* Accessing other "variables" directly from functions.
* Pointing to shit on the heap. If you want to return certain objects from a function and they are stack based then when the function returns you lose your reference as the stack is gone. So you alloc shit off the heap and return a pointer to it.
* Binary dick trees.

>>8
* Segmentation faults.

>>8
* Buffer overrun exploits.

>>8
* Memory errors that evade testing.

>>8
* Inflexible design, due to hard coded freeing rules.

* Hand coded optimization when a compiler wouldn't be clever enough to implement it itself (the optimization cannot feasibly be proven correct).