Thread: newbie-functions vs reference

To understand pointers and references you need to understand how a variable is transported. When you pass a variable to a function through an argument that variable is copied so you end up having 2 copies of that var in memory, however, only for a short period of time as the other copy only lasts as long as the function scope.

But when you reference (&) a variable no copy is made so you are directly accessing the variable, this is more efficient but is succeptable to having the var corrupted if your function or program errors.

When you use a pointer(*) you are using the address of the variable, it's physical location in memory, and to get at the data within you must de-reference the pointer to change the value of it. This is safer than referencing(&) but since it has to be de-referenced to get to the data is less efficient.

It's hard to come up with a rule of thumb when using any of them but I generally use a reference in my function arguments when I have GLOBAL vars or Var heavy classes, or predefined Class objects. For my User Defined Classes, when I have to create a variable or use it as a function argument I use a pointer.

Keep reading until you get to Classes, then pointers and dereferencing will make more sense to you.

A linked-list is like an array only it can expand and grow, you can add or remove from a linked-list to make it as large or small as you need. It uses pointers to point to the next and previous instances of the elements. It can be thought of like a Chain(link) with each link in the chain having a reference to where the next and previous links are, this way it can grow to any size suited at runtime. Using arrays forces you to predefine the size of the array you need.

Using pointers and referencing becomes important when you program large applications and also heavy processing apps like video games. The more memory you can conserve for more important processes the better, this way you don't have unnecessary instances of vars and Classes floating in memory at the same time.