What about pointers?
I read in more than one book on Java and in more than one description of other scripting languages that the language was "robust" or that it avoided bug-prone practices by virtue of not having pointers. Since I have experience in both teaching the C language (with pointers) at a novice level and in programming C at an advanced level, I think I can comment on this. Indeed, in my experience, novice programmers make a lot of pointer errors. To test myself in this aspect, I noted serious errors that I made during a two-day implementation of a new code that would be embedded into an existing application. I wrote over 500 lines of C code in those days. With "serious errors" I mean that I only counted those errors that caused invalid memory accesses. Logical errors and syntax errors were waved (the compiler catches syntax errors anyway).

In those two days, I made several array indexing errors, where the index was out of range, negative, or just garbage (uninitialized). I did not make any pointer mistake (as far as I know). There were approximately equally many pointer as array operations in the code. An interview of a colleague gave me the impression that pointers were not a major source of errors in his code either. So based on an amateurish empirical study with a population of a mere two persons, I dare to challenge the statement that, in general, pointers should be considered more harmful than arrays.

The Small language has no pointers, but you won't catch me saying that, therefore, Small is a robust language. The current implementation for the abstract machine for Small performs bounds checking on array indices -if it knows the bounds of the array- and that makes it a little robust. The abstract machine also verifies that every indirect memory access stays within the address range defined for each program, which also gives Small some robustness. But making a logical error in a mortgage calculation that'll cause you great misery is as easy in Small as in any other language... with or without pointers.

Wenn ihr jmd zum testen braucht sagt bescheid....