Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, fifth edition

Hour 12. Creating References

What You’ll Learn in This Hour:

• What references are

• How references differ from pointers

• How to create and use references

• What the limitations of references are

• How to pass values and objects into and out of functions by reference

What Is a Reference?

In the past 2 hours, you learned how to use pointers to manipulate objects on the heap and how to refer to those objects indirectly. References, the topic of this hour, give you almost all the power of pointers but with a much easier syntax.

A reference is an alias. When you create a reference, you initialize it with the name of another object, the target. From that moment on, the reference acts as an alternative name for the target, and anything you do ...