How does a reference work?

[enricodegan]

I’m a bit confused on how references actually work.
Let’s say I have this:

int i = 17;
int& r = i;

If I understand correctly, variables don’t interact with their memory/address, they only get the value that has been assigned to them.

So … do references first access the address of the variable and consequently the value?

OR does the reference first access the variable and then the value?

Thanks,
Enrico

[DanM]

They’re implemented as pointers, there’s no such thing as references at the hardware level. So you can think of it as a pointer that’s always dereferenced when accessed.