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C passes parameters "by value" which means that the actual parameter values are copied
into local storage. The caller and callee functions do not share any memory -- they each
have their own copy. This scheme is fine for many purposes, but it has two
disadvantages.

1) Because the callee has its own copy, modifications to that memory are not communicated back to the caller. Therefore, value parameters do not allow the callee
to communicate back to the caller. The function's return value can communicate some information back to the caller, but not all problems can be solved with the single
return value.


2) Sometimes it is undesirable to copy the value from the caller to the callee because the
value is large and so copying it is expensive, or because at a conceptual level copying
the value is undesirable.

The alternative is to pass the arguments "by reference". Instead of passing a copy of a value from the caller to the callee, pass a pointer to the value. In this way there is only one copy of the value at any time, and the caller and callee both access that one value through pointers.

Some languages support reference parameters automatically. C does not do this -- the programmer must implement reference parameters manually using the existing pointer constructs in the language.

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