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In the C++ programming language, a reference is a simple reference datatype that is less powerful but safer than the pointer type inherited from C.The name C++ reference may cause confusion, as in computer science a reference is a general concept datatype, with pointers and C++ references being specific reference datatype implementations.
In C++, classes can be forward-declared if you only need to use the pointer-to-that-class type (since all object pointers are the same size, and this is what the compiler cares about). This is especially useful inside class definitions, e.g. if a class contains a member that is a pointer (or a reference) to another class.
C++ also supports another form of reference, quite different from a pointer, called simply a reference or reference type. Pointer arithmetic , that is, the ability to modify a pointer's target address with arithmetic operations (as well as magnitude comparisons), is restricted by the language standard to remain within the bounds of a single ...
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
This feature was eventually removed, and now this in C++ is an r-value. [9] Early versions of C++ did not include references and it has been suggested that had they been so in C++ from the beginning, this would have been a reference, not a pointer. [10] C++ lets objects destroy themselves with the source code statement: delete this.
References are widely used in programming, especially to efficiently pass large or mutable data as arguments to procedures, or to share such data among various uses.In particular, a reference may point to a variable or record that contains references to other data.
A tracking reference in C++/CLI is a handle of a passed-by-reference variable. It is similar in concept to using *& (reference to a pointer) in standard C++, and (in function declarations) corresponds to the ref keyword applied to types in C#, or ByRef in Visual Basic .NET. C++/CLI uses a ^% syntax to indicate a tracking reference to a handle.
The specification for pass-by-reference or pass-by-value would be made in the function declaration and/or definition. Parameters appear in procedure definitions; arguments appear in procedure calls. In the function definition f(x) = x*x the variable x is a parameter; in the function call f(2) the value 2 is the argument of the function. Loosely ...