dereference

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word dereference. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word dereference, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say dereference in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word dereference you have here. The definition of the word dereference will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofdereference, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
See also: déréférencé and déréférence

English

Etymology

From de- +‎ reference.

Pronunciation

Verb

dereference (third-person singular simple present dereferences, present participle dereferencing, simple past and past participle dereferenced)

  1. (programming) To access the value or object located in a memory location addressed by a pointer or another value interpreted as such; to access a value being referenced by something else.
    Attempting to dereference a null pointer often results in a crash.
  2. (computing, in operating systems derived from Unix) To operate on the file or directory pointed to by a symbolic link, rather than on the link itself.
    Synonyms: follow, resolve
    With the find command, any symbolic links appearing after -follow will be dereferenced.

Derived terms

Translations

Noun

dereference (plural dereferences)

  1. The act by which something is dereferenced.
    • 1999, Michael Barry Greenwald, Non-blocking synchronization and system design, page 77:
      Either each dereference must use a complicated DCAS protocol, or each pointer must include a version number that is managed on each modification and checked on each dereference, or storage management must be tightly coupled […]

See also

References

Wikious
Boobota
Sagapedia