Is passing pointer argument, pass by value in C++?

Question

Is passing pointer argument, pass by value in C++? Since i see that any change to the pointer as such is not reflected outside the method. The changes i do by dereferencing the pointer is reflected though.

In that case, is it acceptable/standard procedure to use pointer to pointer as argument to a function to modify the pointer value as such within a function?

Answer 1

Yes to both.

Pointers are passed by value as anything else. That means the contents of the pointer variable (the address of the object pointed to) is copied. That means that if you change the value of the pointer in the function body, that change will not be reflected in the external pointer that will still point to the old object. But you can change the value of the object pointed to.

If you want to reflect changes made to the pointer to the external pointer (make it point to something else), you need two levels of indirection (pointer to pointer). When calling functions it's done by putting a & before the name of the pointer. It is the standard C way of doing things.

When using C++, using references is preferred to pointer (henceforth also to pointer to pointer).

For the why references should be preferred to pointers, there is several reasons:

• references introduce less syntaxic noise than pointers in function body
• references keep more informations than pointers, than can be useful for compiler

Drawbacks of references are mostly:

• they break the simple pass-by-value rule of C, what makes understanding the behavior of a function regarding of parameters (will they be changed ?) less obvious. You also need function prototype to be sure. But that is not really worse than the multiple pointer levels necessary when using C.
• they are not supported by C, that can be a problem when you write code that should work with both C and C++ programs (but that's not the most usual case).

In the specific case of pointer to pointer, the difference is mostly simplicity, but using reference it may also be easy to remove both levels of pointers and pass only one reference instead of a pointer to pointer.