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Why is dereferencing called dereferencing?
I’m just learning pointers properly, and I’d like to know why dereferencing is called that. It confused me as it sounds like you are removing a reference, rather than going via the pointer to the destination.
Can anyone explain why it is called this?
To me something like destination or pointed_to_value would make more sense.
A pointer refers to an object. Ergo, we dereference the pointer (or, get the referent of the pointer) to get the object pointed-to.
The de- prefix most likely comes from the Latin preposition meaning from; I suppose you could think of dereference as meaning “to obtain the referent (or object) from the reference.”