OK, lets get some of these basics out of the way.

Do you agree:

That at a high level we can define Object-oriented programming (OOP) as a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications.

And at a high level objects are conceptual entities that generally correspond directly to a contiguous (to the program) block of computer memory of a specific size at a specific location. I say "contiguous (to the program)" because the memory may not be contiguous at run-time, but that implementation detail is abstracted from the developer, at least in the languages of dicussion.

And that C++ implements a specific OOP style called Class Based OOP. Also, VB.Net, C#, Smalltalk and Java also implement this type of OOP. And that while there are many languages that could be discussed, it is better to just limit the discussion to only a few similar languages that implement these concepts in different ways.

And that Class Based OOP implements classes of objects. In this model objects are entities that combine state (data), behavior (procedures, or methods) and identity (unique existence among all other objects).

And that identity is realized through references.

And that a reference (at a high level, not a specific implementation of it yet) contains the information that is necessary for the identity property to be realized and allows access to the object with the identity.

So objects have an identity and the identity is access through a reference to that identity.

And that reference is implemented in these languages by:
C++ - the use of pointers and references (which will be called C++ references to distinguish between the reference concept and C++'s implementation of it)

And that VB.Net, C#, Java implement reference by using the concept of reference type variables where the programmer works with a variable that is only a type-safe managed pointer to the actual object instance.

Do you agree?