Indirection

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In computer programming, indirection (also called dereferencing) 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.

Another important example is the domain name system which enables names such as en.wikipedia.org to be used in place of network addresses such as 208.80.154.224. The indirection from human-readable names to network addresses means that the references to a web page become more memorable, and links do not need to change when a web site is relocated to a different server.