Is always passing by reference a bad practice? [duplicate]

Question

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Are there benefits of passing by pointer over passing by reference in C++? (7 answers)

Closed 8 years ago.

First, I would like to clarify my question here. During my coding development, I found myself passing by reference in my class member functions except for those built-in types. But I have an idea in my mind why wouldn't I use a pointer to pass in an argument (passing by pointers).

Is it a bad practice to pass by reference not passing by pointers?

Answer 1

One common style is to pass input arguments by const reference, and output arguments by pointer. In this style, we don't pass output arguments by non-const reference to more clearly delineate input from output arguments.