Whats the significance of return by reference?

Question

In C++,

function() = 10;

works if the function returns a variable by reference.

What are the use cases of it?

Answer 1

Consider the following code, MyFunction returns a pointer to an int, and you set a value to the int.

int  *i;
i = MyFunction();
*i = 10;

Now shorten that to

*(MyFunction()) = 10;

It does exactly the same thing as the first code block.

You can look at a reference as just a pointer that's always dereferenced. So if my function returned a reference - not a pointer - to an int the frist code block would become

int  &i;
i = MyFunction();
i = 10;

and the second would become

MyFunction() = 10;

This is what i was looking for