This has always bugged me too. I don't understand why people make such a big deal about pass-by-value and pass-by-reference when the latter is essentially a sma

This has always bugged me too. I don't understand why people make such a big deal about pass-by-value and pass-by-reference when the latter is essentially a small layer of syntactic sugar over the former. Anything you can do with reference variables can be done with pointers, with a few more characters (and arguably easier to read, if you're not used to reference variables), so from a semantic point of view it doesn't add anything new. PBV and PBR seems to be a tiny distinction and yet, we have blog posts and interview questions and online debates about whether a language falls into the first or second category.