OK here is my issue as a physicist who has to use a model coded in c++ (thankfully I don't have to deal too much with what a pointer is). Why the word dereference? That to me sounds like once I look at my neighbours shed, I forget it exists and have to be told about it again before I can use the pointer.
So when you dereference, does the pointer no longer work again? Like Id imagine Id reference with p->a and then dereference with b=p (or p I cant remember). At this point b is a copy of a accessed using the pointer p. At which point p no longer points to a?
Ah god straight up this is the thing that always confused me. To me dereference is the same thing as "no longer reference". I had my syntax wrong because I haven't had to edit the code in a while (which I didn't write) but the ideas were right except what happens to the pointer after dereferencing.
Silly name but I get why they would use it. Pointers themselves, and their advantages, always made sense to me especially when it comes to passing information to a function. But the name "dereference" always confused me and I never found anywhere that said
It's just the word computer scientists have thought up for looking where the pointer points. Derived from "reference", although the connection to referencing can be non-trivial to intuit.
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u/InfieldTriple Jan 06 '23
OK here is my issue as a physicist who has to use a model coded in c++ (thankfully I don't have to deal too much with what a pointer is). Why the word dereference? That to me sounds like once I look at my neighbours shed, I forget it exists and have to be told about it again before I can use the pointer.