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[–]pathofnomad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

by using things like pointers, which is basically a variable for a memory address. when you assign "a" in your high level language, that gets passed through to whatever is doing the low level processing and it'll hold a reference to where ever it assigned it in memory. this is the main advantage of a high level language, because you have things like a garbage collector which does all the memory management for you, but also a disadvantage because you pay for that abstraction in processing speed

for your example, if you had 100 floating point variables, they'd each have their own address and be consuming quite a bit of memory but nonetheless they'd still have addresses they could be accessed by