Passing points or by reference in C - Stackoverflow

Another great set of observations about pointers in C.

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To elaborate a little more. Whatever you pass as an argument to c functions, it is passed by values only. Whether it be a variable's value or the variable address.

What makes the difference is what you are sending.

When we pass-by-value we are passing the value of the variable to a function. When we pass-by-reference we are passing an alias of the variable to a function. C can pass a pointer into a function but that is still pass-by-value. It is copying the value of the pointer, the address, into the function.

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• If you are sending the value of a variable, then only the value will be received by the function, and changing that won't effect the original value.
• If you are sending the address of a variable, then also only the value(the address in this case) is sent, but since you have the address of a variable it can be used to change the original value.

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See full entry here.