Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

This seems as good a place as any to put out a public request for what may well be a coined term.

When I was teaching programming, I found that a lot of old-timers had difficulty with pointers. To explain in non-technical terms, a pointer is a place where a programs stores not a desired piece of data, but the place where that piece of data can be found. It's an important concept to understand because pointers can be used in ways that regular data can't: you can save a pointer in two places, use one of those to change the value of the data item to which it points, and now both pointers refer to the changed value (doing this without pointers requires changing the value of both targets, with the risk that someone else will retrieve and use the old value before you get the second copy changed).

Anyway, the vocabulary quest: to label the people who can't grasp the idea, I need a name for the fear of indirect reference. Some kind of -phobia, I'm sure, but I can't dig up a suitable Greek root. Maybe something to do with a pointing finger?