indirection

n. indirect course, circuitous route, roundabout method; lack of direction; dishonesty, deceitfulness

In computer programming, indirection is the ability to reference something using a name, reference, or container instead of the value itself.The most common form of indirection is the act of manipulating a value through its memory address. For example, accessing a variable through the use of a pointer. A stored pointer that exists to provide a reference to an object by double indirection is called an indirection node.In some older computer architectures, indirect words supported a variety of more-or-less complicated addressing modes.
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Noun
1. indirect procedure or action; "he tried to find out by indirection"
(hypernym) procedure, process
2. deceitful action that is not straightforward; "he could see through the indirections of diplomats"
(hypernym) deception, deceit, dissembling, dissimulation

(n.)
Oblique course or means; dishonest practices; indirectness.
  

<programming> 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)