A reference, or a references point, is the intensional use of one thing, a point of reference or reference state, to indicate something else. When reference is intended, what the reference points to is called the referent.
General Examples
Some general examples are:
the name Jane Doe used to identify a particular woman
a traffic sign warning of an upcoming turn off
a wedding ring indicating a certain kind of relationship and
samples of various musical works being incorporated into a new one.
References are indicated by sounds, pictures, text, indexes and objects but endless concrete and abstract methods can be used intentionally. This includes methods that intentionally hide the reference from some observers, as in cryptography.
In scholarship, a reference may be a citation of a text that has been used in the creation of a piece of work such as an essay, report, or oration. Its primary purpose is to allow people who read such work to examine the author sources, either for validity or to learn more about the subject. Such items are often listed at the end of an article or book in a section marked bibliography or references.
A bibliographical section often contains works not cited by the author, but used as background reading or listed as potentially useful to the reader. A reference section contains all of the works and only those works cited by the author in the main text.
Example is a name reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 2606 that is not intended to be installed as a top level domain in the global Domain Name System of the Internet.
Other reserved names are test, invalid, and localhost.
The reasons for reservation of these top level domain names is to reduce the likelihood of conflict and confusion.
This allows the use of these names for either documentation purposes or in local testing scenarios.
The top level domain example is explicitly intended to be used in documentation or other technical writing where domain names are presented as examples in usage or presentation of concepts of the Domain Name System.
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