From: John Beckett 

"Antti Kurenniemi"  wrote in
message news::
> But when you pass that "d" to a function, you're passing a
"pointer"
> (reference? handle? what do you call it now?) to that object and *not*
> creating another object in the scope of the function that was called, right?

Paul covered all the possibilities. I will just add that if you have:

void func1(Date d)
{
     // ...
}

then call the above with something like:
    Date a;
    func1(a);

the result is that the variable a is copied to the argument d (using the
copy constructor of Date). So, passing an int and passing a Date are
conceptually identical.

Since the above is usually inefficient, it is common for the function to be
defined in the alternative way shown below:

void func2(Date &d)
{
    // ...
}

The call to func2 looks exactly like a call to func1, i.e. func2(a).

However, func2(a) actually passes a reference to a (which is physically
identical with a pointer to a). The fact that this is common is probably
why you said what you did earlier.

John

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