Yeah, it's an interesting problem. One that I should probably understand better... I mean, I "get" it: the RAM machine model is simple. But I've not programmed enough C (or similar) to understand how far the semantics would permeate day-to-day programs.

There's the part of me that's like "oh, just have primitives to reference & dereference addresses; easy". I seem to recall Lisps that use something like (ref x) and (deref x), and the explicitness pleases me, coming from "modern" languages where you have to remember odd rules about whether/where things are passed as pointers. But then I read C code and see all these pointers-to-pointers all over the place---in spots of code where I normally wouldn't think of pointers at all. Then again, that might be endemic to C, where you're probably just being destructive by default.