<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.
