Question

There seems to be many relavent questions talking about pointer vs. reference, but I couldn’t find what I want to know. Basically, an object is passed in by a reference:

funcA(MyObject &objRef) { ... }

Within the function, can I get a pointer to that object instead of the reference? If I treat the reference objRef as an alias to the MyObject, would &objRef actually give me a pointer to the MyObject? It doesn’t seem likely. I am confused.

Edit: Upon closer examination, objRef does give me back the pointer to object that I need – Most of you gave me correct info/answer, many thanks. I went along the answer that seems to be most illustrative in this case.

Answer 1

Yes, applying the address-of operator to the reference is the same as taking the address of the original object.

#include <iostream>

struct foo {};

void bar( const foo& obj )
{
  std::cout << &obj << std::endl;
}

int main()
{
  foo obj;
  std::cout << &obj << std::endl;
  bar( obj );

  return 0;
}

Result:

0x22ff1f
0x22ff1f