Pointers are ubiquitous in modern object-oriented programming languages, and many data structures such as trees, lists, graphs, hash tables, etc. depend on them heavily. Unfortunately, pointers can add significant complexity to programming. Pointers can make storage management more complex, pointers can make assignment and equality semantics more complex, pointers can increase the ways two different names (access paths) can designate the same object, pointers can make program analysis and proof more complex, and pointers can make it harder to 'divide and conquer' a data structure for parallel processing.

Is there an alternative to using pointers? ParaSail, a new parallel object-oriented programming language, adopts a different paradigm for defining data structures. Rather than using pointers, ParaSail supports flexible data structuring using 'expandable' (and shrinkable) objects, along with generalized indexing. By eliminating pointers, ParaSail significantly reduces the complexity for the programmer, while also allowing ParaSail to provide pervasive, safe, object-oriented parallel programming.