Pointers in cpp

[sdj]

I saw a pointer which was declared as *& in a program... what does *& represent?

[Caligulaminus]

It's a reference to a pointer.

[pogrady]

Well lets see...

the "*" is the de-reference operator, and the "&" is the reference operator.

So,although i have never seen this before, it seems that the code above is de-referencing the reference of the object, or returning the memory location of the object.

[zb0S216C]

@pogrady: You cannot dereference a reference.

As Caligulaminus said, it's a reference to a pointer. Some, if not most, programmers will say something similar to: "it's pointless!", when in fact, it's not. For example: Say I wanted to move a given pointer from one location to another. You'd think of something like this:

void move_pointer(int *pointer)
{
    pointer = some_address;
}

This is wrong, because pointer is a copy of the pointer passed to it. The C++ solution is to use a reference to a pointer:

void move_pointer(int *&pointer)
{
    pointer = some_address;
}

Because we're referring to the pointer given to pointer, we can modify the original pointer. We could use a pointer to a pointer, but this is C++.

_Wazzak