Knowing how references really differ from pointers should help you decide when to use references and when to stick with pointers. In C++, references provide many of the same capabilities as pointers.

And when you pass a pointer into a function it is a copy of the pointer, which is why you don't want to nest functions and keep passing in pointers, the stack will have the pointer multiple times.

A .NET single-function delegate (singlecast?) carries the function pointer and the reference to context data (first argument). This first argument is used as this pointer for instance method calls and ...