Question

Say I have a function that takes a const reference to a pointer…

Example:

void Foo( const Bar *&p_Thing, );

and I pass a pointer

Bar *blah = NULL; // Initialized when program starts up

to the function

Foo( blah );

I may encounter a compiler error like this

invalid initialization of reference of type 'const Bar*&' from expression of type 'Bar*'

This has happened to me a few times, and I’d really like to clear up how const operates in terms of applying to parameters in relation to argument passing. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

This is what you want:

void Foo( Bar * const &p_Thing );

Then it becomes a const-reference to a Bar * pointer, which has the lovely feature of compiling.