A reference is just giving another name to an existing object or variable.

  • References must be assigned with some object at the time of declaration.
  • Once the references are initialized with some object or variable, they cannot be changed later.
  • Unlike pointers, we cannot create an array of references.
  • References don’t have their own identity. When we try to get the address of the reference variable using ‘&‘ we will get the address of the variable to which it is referring.
  • The size of stack space allocated for the reference variables varies from machine to machine. In a 32-bit machine, it is 4Bytes whereas in a 64-bit machine it is of 8Bytes.

There is nothing we can do with references that we cannot do with pointers. Both are almost the same with just a syntactic difference.

When we use them in our program references look a bit cleaner than the pointers.

Following is the syntax to declare the reference variable

<TYPE>& ref_name = object_to_point;
int& ref = a;

How to declare and use a reference variable in c++?

#include <iostream>

int main() {

	int a = 10;

	// Created a ref and referenced it to variable 'a'.
	int& ref = a;

	// Accessing the value of 'a' using "ref"
	printf("%d", ref);

	// Modifying the value in 'a' using "ref"
	ref = 20;
	printf("%d", a);

	return 0;
}

The following program gives a compilation error because the reference variable must be initialized with an object.

#include <iostream>

int main() {

	int a = 10;
    
	// Created a ref but did not initilized it with an object.
	int& ref;
	
    printf("%d \n", ref);
	ref = 20;
	printf("%d", a);

	return 0;
}

I hope you got the overview of references and how to use them in C++✌️

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