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Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

> With C++, you don’t see the writes, because it says `some_func(whatever,the_int,SOME_FLAG);` and it can still write the_int if it’s a reference. In C, it would be &the_int, which is easily recognizable.

I don't understand why people do this. C++ has not abolished pointers; it's still possible to require the &, and it increases readability considerably; why ever use references (to value types; objects are different) as function parameters?

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reference to const gives the benefit of passing a pointer, efficiency wise, but prevents the called function from modifying the contents it points to.

AFAICT, that's achievable with pointers, too.

Of course it is, with the minor syntactic addition of callers passing in the memory location. References aren't a _necessary_ feature of function parameters and if the reference is going to be modified, a pointer is more clear and should be used.

But there is a utility in allowing references to exist in the language for overloaded operators, so you can overload a subscript in a collection and assign to it, such as

foo[x] = bar, where foo is a collection of bar objects.

They could have restricted references to just these sorts of use cases and when using foo[x] as an argument, require the user to type &foo[x], but once references are in the language allowing them as parameters seems like a reasonable enough decision to me.

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