Call by Value and Call by Reference in C Programming

 By now we are well familiar with how to call functions. But, if you observe carefully, whenever we called a function and passed something to it we have always passed the ‘values’ of variables to the called function. Such function calls are called ‘calls by value’. By this what we mean is, on calling a function we are passing values of variables to it. The examples of call by value are shown below:
 

sum = calsum ( a, b, c ) ;
f = factr ( a ) ;
 

We have also learnt that variables are stored somewhere in memory. So instead of passing the value of a variable, can we not pass the location number (also called address) of the variable to a function? If we were able to do so it would become a ‘call by reference’. What purpose a ‘call by reference’ serves we would find out a little later. First we must equip ourselves with knowledge of how to make a ‘call by reference’. This feature of C functions needs at least an elementary knowledge of a concept called ‘pointers’. So let us first acquire the basics of pointers after which we would take up this topic once again.