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](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2017-September/876084.html) (looooong) thread on the Python mailing list displays the dispute:

> [Marko](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2017-September/876804.html): Everything in Python evaluates to a pointer  
> [Chris](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2017-September/876815.html): 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen) in CS — are terms of art in philosophy and are vaguely related to pointer, and dereferencing.