what is the meaning of dereference
dereferencing actually refers to the process of getting or setting the value referred to by a reference. For example, If I say. String s = hello. then s is a reference to the actual characters. In this case I can dereference s to get the characters, but if I say, for example.
A pointer is a variable that tells the computer *where* a variable is stored. Dereferencing a pointer tells the computer *what* is in the spot where a pointer is pointing to. hunkeelin (159)