indirection
Manipulating data via its address. Indirection is a powerful and general programming technique. It can be
used for example to process data stored in a sequence of
consecutive memory locations by maintaining a {pointer} to the
current item and incrementing it to point to the next item.
Indirection is supported at the {machine language} level by
{indirect addressing}. Many processor and {operating system}
architectures use {vectors} which are also an instance of
indirection, being locations which hold the address of a
routine to handle a particular event. The event handler can
be changed simply by pointing the vector at a new piece of
code.
{C} includes operators "&" which returns the address of a
{variable} and its inverse "▫" which returns the variable at a
given address.
(1997-02-06)