When to use references vs. pointers

Question

I understand the syntax and general semantics of pointers versus references, but how should I decide when it is more-or-less appropriate to use references or pointers in an

Answer 1

Disclaimer: other than the fact that references cannot be NULL nor "rebound" (meaning thay can't change the object they're the alias of), it really comes down to a matter of taste, so I'm not going to say "this is better".

That said, I disagree with your last statement in the post, in that I don't think the code loses clarity with references. In your example,

add_one(&a);

might be clearer than

add_one(a);

since you know that most likely the value of a is going to change. On the other hand though, the signature of the function

void add_one(int* const n);

is somewhat not clear either: is n going to be a single integer or an array? Sometimes you only have access to (poorly documentated) headers, and signatures like

foo(int* const a, int b);

are not easy to interpret at first sight.

Imho, references are as good as pointers when no (re)allocation nor rebinding (in the sense explained before) is needed. Moreover, if a developer only uses pointers for arrays, functions signatures are somewhat less ambiguous. Not to mention the fact that operators syntax is way more readable with references.