< 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)