[srtjstjsj]

If you don't have a copy of the value, you need someway to find it, right? That's a pointer, or a reference, or a handle. (These are all approximate synonyms for some way to "address" the data.) In the olden days, there was a fixed mapping from a number to a physical location in storage, but now there are many levels of indirection, such as virtual memory, pools, etc.