Summary from answers and links below:
- A pointer can be re-assigned any number of times while a reference can not be reassigned after initialization.
- A pointer can point to NULL while reference can never point to NULL
- You can't take the address of a reference like you can with pointers
- There's no "reference arithmetics" (but you can take the address of an object pointed by a reference and do pointer arithmetics on it as in &obj + 5).
To clarify a misconception:
The C++ standard is very careful to avoid dictating how a compiler must implement references, but every C++ compiler implements references as pointers. That is, a declaration such as:
int &ri = i;allocates the same amount of storage as a pointer, and places the address of i into that storage.
So pointer and reference occupies same amount of memory
As a general rule,
- Use references in function parameters and return types to define attractive interfaces.
- Use pointers to implement algorithms and data structures.
Interesting read:
