References & Pointers
References and pointers are some of the most powerful features in C++; they allow programmers to directly manipulate memory.
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const Reference
const Reference
int triple(int const &i) {
return i * 3;
}In C++, pass-by-reference with const can be used for a function where the parameter(s) won’t change inside the function.
This saves the computational cost of making a copy of the argument.
References and Pointers
Lesson 1 of 1
- 1A computer’s memory is a sequence of bytes. We can number the bytes from 0 to the last one. Each number, known as an address, represents a location in the …
- 2In C++, a reference variable is an alias for something else, that is, another name for an already existing variable. So suppose we make Sonny a reference to someone named Songqiao. You can refe…
- 3So what’s a good use case for references? Let’s take a look. Previously, when we passed parameters to a function, we used normal variables and that’s known as pass-by-value. But because the vari…
- 4Remember const? The const keywords tells the compiler that we won’t change something. For example, in the following code, we are telling the compiler that the double variable pi will stay at 3.14 …
- 5So we haved learned about references (aliases), which are created by using the & symbol in a variable declaration. But the & sign can have another meaning. The “address of” operator, &, is used to…
- 7So now we learned what a pointer is and how to create one, but is there a way to obtain the value pointed to by the pointer? The asterisk sign * a.k.a. the dereference operator is used to obtain t…
- 8When we declare a pointer variable like so, its content is not intialized: int* ptr; In other words, it contains an address of “somewhere”, which is of course not a valid location. This is [dang…
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References & Pointers
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