Are there benefits of passing by pointer over passing by reference in C++? I'll leave my upvote, for now. Do "superinfinite" sets exist? But, technically, there is no such thing as "passing by reference" in C, there is only "passing by value". That is what C allows, and it is pass-by-reference every time you pass a pointer, because a pointer is a. For smaller data structures (like an int), passing by reference can inhibit performance. "ptr's address" is not correct: you print the pointer, which is the address of variable, not it's address, that would have been printf("ptr's address %d\n", &ptr); . The int type value was incremented, and that is the side effect that make us think that it was a pass-by-reference function call. Nhng u c chung mt nguyn l l: Pass-by-value c hiu l khi bn thay i bin trong hm th ngoi hm s khng b nh hng. Address of value a,inside function funcByReference is: 3209464 Difference between pass by value and pass by reference in c Kerja Due to the growing audience of VueUse, we received a huge amount of feature requests and pull requests. When you pass a built-in array name, you are actually passing a pointer (by value) to the first element in the . 1. Pass By Reference vs. How to Pass JSON Data in a URL using CURL in PHP ? What's the difference between passing by reference vs. passing by value? 7-Functions - C Program Function - Chapter- Functions A function is a It is copying the value of the pointer, the address, into the function. Memory Requirement Besides, the pass by value requires more memory than pass by reference. So when the value is changed using the reference it changes the value of the actual variable. Where does this (supposedly) Gibson quote come from? A computer program is a set of instructions that directs the CPU to perform a certain task. A pointer can be re-assigned while a reference cannot, and must be assigned at initialization only. When you are doing arr[2] you are dereferencing the memory address starting at 0x102 and changing its value. pointers and references are two different thigngs. Where does this (supposedly) Gibson quote come from? Technically, the compiler can simply substitute the referenced variable's memory address directly, and I suspect this to be more true than generally believed. By clicking Post Your Answer, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. There are other techniques for doing this. Every other time you pass data to a function (besides scanf), the data outside the function is not modified - it's like a local variable inside the function - that is because C creates a copy of the data that the function uses. When the function returns, the stack is popped off and anything passed to the function on the stack is effectively gone. @SamGinrich, "One aspect of C functions may be unfamiliar to programmers who are used to some other languages, particularly Fortran. For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse. And now it's apparent that tommieb is only mostly right: you can apply & to any object, not just variables. This article is contributed by Rohit Kasle.