A pointer or reference is the memory address of the beginning of a record or block of storage, which extends through higher memory addresses. A pointer has the same size as int, 32 bits, which can address 4 Giga-bytes of storage.
An object or reference type in a language such as Java is also a record, which has as its first item a pointer or other code that indicates its class.
As in this example, a record often contains other pointers. This is sometimes called a boxed integer .