Use of the & operator in C++ function signatures

Question

I\'m currently reading through Accelerated C++ and I realized I don\'t really understand how & works in function signatures.

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Answer 1

While pass by reference may be implemented by the compiler by passing the address as a pointer, semantically it has nothing to do with addresses or pointers. in simple terms it is merely an alias for a variable.

C++ has a lot of cases where syntax is reused in different contexts with different semantics and this is one of those cases.