content-addressable is admittedly perhaps a little bit niche. If you spend some time in the version control/distributed data structures space you will have run

content-addressable is admittedly perhaps a little bit niche. If you spend some time in the version control/distributed data structures space you will have run into it. But if you haven't d then you will perhaps never have encountered it. Your description of a hash table and references is a pretty close description of the idea at it's core.