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 similar to a pointer, except that you don’t need to use a prefix ∗ to access the value referred to by the reference. Also, a reference cannot be made to refer to a different object after its initialization.

References are particularly useful for specifying function arguments.

for more information see "A Tour of C++" by "Bjarne Stroustrup" (2014) Pages 11-12