"call-by-reference" already has a technical meaning, and it is widely-misunderstood because "reference" is an overloaded term. Variables are cells that contain

"call-by-reference" already has a technical meaning, and it is widely-misunderstood because "reference" is an overloaded term. Variables are cells that contain values. A better name for "call-by-reference" semantics is "call-by-variable", because the variable -- the value-containing cell -- is what is semantically received by the called function. Moreover, it doesn't matter how this is actually implemented, so long as a caller may effectively rebind a caller's variable. In Java, variables may contain either "reference values" or "primitive values". It is never possible, in Java, to rebind a caller's variable. (Consider that there is never a call site that could be rendered illegal by making a non-final argument final.) We should not call it "pass-by-reference", not only because it's incorrect but because, to your point, it's entirely misleading when "reference" already has a distinct meaning in Java. Pointers are strictly more powerful in a language than pass-by-reference. If you have pointers and pass-by-value, you can emulate pass-by-reference by providing a pointer value that points to a variable cell. So if you have pointers already, you don't strictly need call-by-reference. C# doesn't have pointers in the managed subset, because raw pointers can't be managed. But call-by-reference can be added relatively easily, so you can recover a small amount of what could be done if you had pointers. That's the purpose of the `ref` keyword. Java doesn't have pointers, either, but it also doesn't have call-by-reference. That makes it impossible to write the canonical example of call-by-reference, `int a = 1; int b = 2; swap(a, b)`. Instead, you must reify the concept of a cell in the first place, e.g. by wrapping each value in a one-element array, and pass those cells to `swap` instead.