My humble opinion of "by reference" calling is that it is anything but more readable and useful. It actually hides the true intent of the code off in some header or declaration somewhere. By reference calling is some recent fabrication by lazy programmers!!

It is FAR FAR more useful to have explicit intent specified either by value passing or by pointer passing and to have the pointer usage have a unique syntax for its use.

I'm not sure just who invented "by reference" calling methodology but I do know that they should be barred from porting their concepts to microcontroller programming.

Michael Karas