Declaring a variable as a reference rather than a normal variable simply entails appending an ampersand to the type name, such as this "reference to an int"
Did you notice the "...."? (Probably, right? After all, it's 25% of the example.) When a reference is created, you must tell it which variable it will become an alias for. After you create the reference, whenever you use the variable, you can just treat it as though it were a regular integer variable. But when you create it, you must initialize it with another variable, whose address it will keep around behind the scenes to allow you to use it to modify that variable.
In a way, this is similar to having a pointer that always points to the same thing. One key difference is that references do not require dereferencing in the same way that pointers do; you just treat them as normal variables. A second difference is that when you create a reference to a variable, you need not do anything special to get the memory address. The compiler figures this out for you:
Functions taking References Parameters
Here's a simple example of setting up a function to take an argument "by reference", implementing the swap function:
Both arguments are passed "by reference"--the caller of the function need not even be aware of it:
After the swap, a will be 3 and b will be 2. The fact that references require no extra work can lead to confusion at times when variables magically change after being passed into a function. Bjarne Stroustrup suggests that for arguments that the function is expected to change, using a pointer instead of a reference helps make this clear--pointers require that the caller explicitly pass in the memory address.
Efficiency Gains
You might wonder why you would ever want to use references other than to change the value--well, the answer is that passing by reference means that the variable need not be copied, yet it can still be passed into a function without doing anything special. This gives you the most bang for your buck when working with classes. If you want to pass a class into a function, it almost always makes sense for the function to take the class "by reference"--but generally, you want to use a const reference.
This might look something like this:
The great thing about using const references is that you can be sure that the variable isn't modified, so you can immediately change all of your functions that take large objects--no need to make a copy anymore. And even you were conscientious and used pointers to pass around large objects, using references in the future can still make your code that much cleaner.
References and Safety