That's an approach to directly accessing memory not an approach to 'pointers'. Pointers are an entirely different language facility. For one thing, they're typed. PEEK just gives you bytes and you can neither reference or dereference anything.
You can't take the address of a A$, for instance, and do anything with it. And in your case 'A' is always in bytes unlike a C pointer which has arithmetic that depends on its type. PEEKs and POKEs are not pointers.
QBasic has VARADR (or VARADDR) that gives you the memory location for a variable. QuickBasic also has SADD which gives you the memory location for the first character of a string, although for some reason it isn't available in QBasic (but you can figure out from the string data anyway, VARADR(A$) points to a pair of length+data words).
I don't need jokes about laser pointers to present languages, some of them much older than C, which have pointers with 1:1 features to C ones.
Of course, it kind of hurts the urban myth that C is a special snowflake among systems programming languages, having languages almost 10 years older with such features.
The original comment was a comparison of pointers in C and PEEKs and POKEs in BASIC. So making up stuff about how assembly has 'pointers' or trying to start some argument about C with a statement nobody made is not really much more directly related to what we're discussing than a comment about the music of the Pointer Sisters.
' a = *addr
a = PEEK (addr%)
' *addr = value
POKE addr%, value
'a = addr
a = addr
'addr++
INCR addr%, 2
'a = &variable
DEF SEG = VARSEG(variable)
a = VARPTR(varible)
a = VARPTR$(varible)
Well, I'm not sure if there are strict rules to what should be called a pointer and what not (which was why I was a little bit vague in my post: In my defense, I stated "there are no pointers"). I think you can still dereference something by just manually copying the bytes.
