compiler error saying invalid initialization of reference of type something& from expression of type something*

Question

I have a function prototype like

test(something &)

and i am doing

something *ss = new something();

Answer 1

Your function expects a reference to something, and you are passing it a pointer to something. You need to de-reference the pointer:

test(*ss);

That way the function takes a reference to the object pointed at by ss. If you had a something object, you could pass that directly to:

something sss;
test(sss); // test takes a reference to the sss object.