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Pointers in Fortran are aliases for their targets, much like references in C++. You reference the data without any special operators. The pointer-ness in Fortran is an attribute. pointer-ness in C/C++ is part of its data type. reference-ness in C++ is kind of like an attribute. A major difference between Fortran pointers and C++ references is that Fortran pointers are retargetable; C++ references can only be initialized. C/C++ pointers are "retargetable", but that's because pointer-ness is part of the data type, so "retargetting" is paramount to value assignment (as opposed to Fortran's pointer "assignment"/targetting). Fortran also has array pointers; C++ only has scalar references. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%