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All Values are Pointers to Objects

As we said earlier, all values are conceptually pointers to objects on a heap, and you don't ever have to explicitly free memory.

By "object," we don't necessarily mean object in the object-oriented sense. We just mean data objects like Pascal records or C structs, which can be referenced via pointers and may (or may not) hold state information.

Some versions of Scheme do have object systems for object-oriented programming. (This includes our own RScheme system, where standard Scheme types are all classes in a unified object system.) In this book, however, we use the word "object" in a broader sense, meaning an entity that you can have a pointer to.


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