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What is the difference between Go's pointer dereferencing and pointer indirections?

In Go, pointer dereferencing and pointer indirection are two ways to access the value of a variable indirectly through a pointer.

Pointer dereferencing is the act of using the ***** operator to access the value stored in the memory location pointed to by a pointer. For example, given a pointer variable **p** that points to an **int** variable **x**, we can dereference **p** to obtain the value of **x** using the ***** operator:

var x int = 42
var p *int = &x
fmt.Println(*p) // prints 42

Here, **p** is used to dereference the pointer **p** and obtain the value of **x**.

Pointer indirection, on the other hand, is the implicit dereferencing that occurs when we use a pointer variable in an expression. For example, consider the same **p** and **x** variables as before:
var x int = 42
var p *int = &x
fmt.Println(p)  // prints the memory address of x
fmt.Println(&p) // prints the memory address of p

Here, when we use the **p** pointer variable in the **fmt.Println** function, Go implicitly dereferences **p** to obtain the value of **x**. Similarly, when we take the address of **p** using the **&** operator, Go does not dereference **p** but instead returns the memory address of the pointer variable itself.

In general, pointer dereferencing is used when we want to explicitly access the value pointed to by a pointer, while pointer indirection is used when we want to pass a pointer value around without having to explicitly dereference it each time.

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