Question

While going over some code I came across the following line of code

ostream& out = resp.send();

The way I interpreted it was that the resp object has a send method that returns an ostream object called out. What is the purpose of the ‘&’ symbol here? Does it mean that the resp object returns a reference to an object of type ostream?

It will be great to get some clarification.

Thanks

Answer 1

You are right. The & creates a reference named ‘out’ to the ostream object that was returned by reference from resp.send().

Note: We know that it was returned by reference because standard stream objects can not be copied therefore it can not be returned by value.

For example:

int x =1;
int& y = x;  //y is a reference to x.             
y=2;
cout<<x; //prints 2

Here is a nice explanation of references in C++ (from Bruce Eckel’s book Thinking in C++)