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
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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 - Conversely, for those giving computer-sciency answers, see here. It demonstrates that both memory and pointers are inextricably linked to the issue.
- Also this is not specifically about Python. Java, Ruby, Javascript etc., all have the same issue with small variations in terminology.