Pointer vs. Reference

Question

What would be better practice when giving a function the original variable to work with:

unsigned long x = 4;

void func1(unsigned long& val) {
     val          


        

Answer 1

A reference is an implicit pointer. Basically you can change the value the reference points to but you can't change the reference to point to something else. So my 2 cents is that if you only want to change the value of a parameter pass it as a reference but if you need to change the parameter to point to a different object pass it using a pointer.