Passing by reference not always the best

I think if I'm passing an int into a function, and provided that I am not making changes to the int, passing it by value is better than passing it by reference.

Because passing by value will copy the int onto the stack, so the program can directly access the int value.

On the other hand, passing by reference will copy the address of the int onto the stack, and the program will need to go to the location of the int to access its value.

Am I right to say this? Please correct me if I'm wrong... :)

passing an int by reference if you aren't going to modify it is pretty worthless, or any primative actually. The main importance for passing something by reference where you aren't going to modify them is in using classes and structs where you would be passing more than 4 or 8 bytes of data and then you should pass a const reference.

if you don't want the original value of the int changed, then you are right.

ok, thanks guys, for clarifying my doubts... =)