USING REFERENCES

A reference appears to be similar to a pointer in many respects, which is why I’m introducing it here, but it really isn’t the same thing at all. The real importance of references becomes apparent only when you get to explore their use with functions, particularly in the context of object-oriented programming. Don’t be misled by their simplicity and what might seem to be a trivial concept. As you will see later, references provide some extraordinarily powerful facilities, and, in some contexts, enable you to achieve results that would be impossible without them.

What Is a Reference?

There are two kinds of references: lvalue references and rvalue references. Essentially, a reference is a name that can be used as an alias for something else.

An lvalue reference is an alias for another variable; it is called an lvalue reference because it refers to a persistent storage location that can appear on the left of an assignment operation. Because an lvalue reference is an alias and not a pointer, the variable for which it is an alias has to be specified when the reference is declared; unlike a pointer, a reference cannot be altered to represent another variable.

An rvalue reference can be used as an alias for a variable, just like an lvalue reference, but it differs from an lvalue reference in that it can also reference an rvalue, which is a temporary value that is essentially transient.

Declaring and Initializing Lvalue References

Suppose that you have declared a variable ...

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