 While a pointer contains the address of the item to which it refers, a handle is an abstraction of a reference which is managed externally; its opacity allows the referent to be relocated in memory by the system without invalidating the handle, which is impossible with pointers.The extra layer of indirection also increases the control that the managing system has over the operations performed on the referent.Typically the handle is an index or a pointer into a global array of tombstones.