That's called indirection and I agree. Abstraction is something else entirely and is usually what you want. Think more like, "things that have provable laws."

That's called indirection and I agree. Abstraction is something else entirely and is usually what you want. Think more like, "things that have provable laws." Eg: concatenating two lists results in a list that is at least as long as the longest input list, for all lists. Concatenation is the operation on lists that is the abstraction... once you have defined it you no longer have to think in terms of loops and building intermediate lists.