Indirection

A quote usually attributed either to David Wheeler or Butler Lampson reads: "There is no problem in computer science that cannot be solved by adding another layer of indirection, except having too many layers of indirection".

His dirges and satires are bold and blunt; they swap the indirection of imagery, obtuse or otherwise, for the snap of metre and rhyme.

I was perhaps guilty of excessive indirection early on, so much so that I briefly acquired the nickname of Gentle Ben in the industry.

Addressing modes The new addressing modes added scaled indexing and another level of indirection to many of the pre-existing modes, and added quite a bit of flexibility to various indexing modes and operations.

However, unlike the load and store instructions, if the indirect address had the most significant bit set, it would perform a further cycle of indirection.

It also avoids the extra indirection required to access the first entry of each bucket (that is, usually the only one).

Later, two language features were added: the bit-field selection operator and the infix byte indirection operator (denoted by the '%' character).

The conceptual view provides a level of indirection between internal and external.

This may result in multiple levels of indirection.

Thus, indirect code is often more compact than direct-threaded code, but the indirection also typically makes it slower, though still usually faster than bytecode interpreters.