Addendum

Reformulation

Addendum 1

Addendum 2 — Reformulation

Reformulation

Thanks to the comments below it occured to me I could reforulate the question more positively. Instead of 'trick', 'evasion' etc., lets talk of...

The Jigsaw Effect

• A completed jigsaw is a completed jigsaw.
• More significantly, an incomplete jigsaw is not a completed jigsaw, even if one piece of of 200 is removed

Some standard egs from philosophy (no relation of CS!)

The Semiotic Ontology

Compare

Saussure offered a 'dyadic' or two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of:

• a 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and
• the 'signified' (signified) - the concept it represents.

with

For Peirce, then, any instance of signification contains a (1) sign-vehicle, (2) an object and (3) interpretant. This triadic structure... is present in all of Pierce's accounts.

The fact that we talk of Sassurean and Piercean semiotics means they are different!

Essential Christianity

The Nicene Creed runs:

I believe in One God, the Father almight...
I believe in One Lord, Jesus Christ, the Only begotten Son of God,
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life... who has spoken through the prophets...

Now say a person says Christ the Son is enough for me; I dont need Father — I am an atheist — and whoever runs after ghosts, holy or otherwise!

Would he be a Christian in any reasonable sense?

Reductionism

[Tnx to Bumble]

Bumble: ...we can account for language about objects at one level in terms of language about objects at a lower level...
Answer: And we can do that reductionism improperly with category errors eg Saying Everything is {Hydrogen, Helium... Plutonium, Californium} is ok; Saying Everything is {electrons, protons, neutrons} is ok — another level. But what if we say Everything is electrons protons and hydrogen?

This wrong way of building ontologies is what I want a term for.

For now and for this forum we can put aside memory/pointers and CS questions in general

I am looking for a term that I would call ontological evasion (or ontlogical elision if we wish to sound more neutral) but I dont find anything like it in the standard places — IEP/SEP/wikipedia.

The context

This is in the technical context of semantics of programming languages [Not remotely political!]

The question arises in certain high level languages in the context of semantics of memory. Lower level languages like C explicitly have a concept (ontology) called pointer, dereferencing it yields a piece of memory.

Languages that lay claim to be more high level do not have a concept of pointer but they still need to have (a model for) memory and so the pointer which is simply a pre-reification of memory willy-nilly gets into the meta-level semantics even if its elided in the manual, ie. the object level.

This (looooong) thread on the Python mailing list displays the dispute:

Marko: Everything in Python evaluates to a pointer
Chris: Python has no such thing as pointer

Some further notes

1. C++ has the situation reified within the language:
   • frank pointers as in C are called, well pointers!
   • elided pointers are called references
   • there are all sorts of others like smart pointers, member pointers etc
2. So different languages (try to) do these things differently with Python avoiding the ontology and C++ making fine distinctions, and so on. While the question here is not regarding fine comp. sc. distinctions, some other nearby generic terms (I can come up with!) are reference, address, handle, descriptor, indirection, alias, link, proxy.
3. Mentioning the list of alternate terms above because reference and reification — sometimes called first-class in CS — are terms of art in philosophy and are vaguely related to pointer, and dereferencing.

I am looking for a term that I would call ontological evasion (or ontlogical elision if we wish to sound more neutral) but I dont find anything like it in the standard places — IEP/SEP/wikipedia.

The context

This is in the technical computer science (CS) context of semantics of programming languages [Not remotely political!]

The question arises in certain high level languages in the context of semantics of memory. Lower level languages like C explicitly have a concept (ontology) called pointer, dereferencing it yields a piece of memory.

Languages that lay claim to be more high level do not have a concept of pointer but they still need to have (a model for) memory and so the pointer which is simply a pre-reification of memory willy-nilly gets into the meta-level semantics even if its elided in the manual, ie. the object level.

This (looooong) thread on the Python mailing list displays the dispute:

Marko: Everything in Python evaluates to a pointer
Chris: Python has no such thing as pointer

Some further notes

1. C++ has the situation reified within the language:
   • frank pointers as in C are called, well pointers!
   • elided pointers are called references
   • there are all sorts of others like smart pointers, member pointers etc
2. So different languages (try to) do these things differently with Python avoiding the ontology and C++ making fine distinctions, and so on. While the question here is not regarding fine CS distinctions, some other nearby generic terms (I can come up with!) are reference, address, handle, descriptor, indirection, alias, link, proxy.
3. Mentioning the list of alternate terms above because reference and reification — sometimes called first-class in CS — are terms of art in philosophy and are vaguely related to pointer, and dereferencing.

Addendum

1. For those claiming this to be inappropriate to this site since its about programming, here is George Carlin describing evasion without any CS stuff. It comes quite close to what I am looking for except that I want a description for Fine talking of X; avoid talking of Y; even though X-Y are inseparable.
   ^{Also I'd rather stay away from a political flavor}
2. Conversely, for those giving computer-sciency answers, see here. It demonstrates that both memory and pointers are inextricably linked to the issue.
3. Also this is not specifically about Python. Java, Ruby, Javascript etc., all have the same issue with small variations in terminology.