Question about tophat ^

Hello all,

Ive programmed for fun in visual basic for years and have been working on teaching myself c++ for the last 6 months or so and Ive been trying to teach myself the benefits of using pointers lately (trying to improve the speed of a project Ive been working on) now I have found all kinds of information on pointers and using indirection (* &) but I am having a problem of figuring out where the tophat ^ fits in to all this, I guess it is a pointer of some kind since it uses the -> to access its members, but what is the difference between ^ and *. After all my searching Ive been able to find very little on the net about the ^. I am not sure if I am even asking the right question to find the information. Could someone please point me to a reference on it so I could understand a little better?

Thanks for taking the time to read through this,

Richard

C++ has no ^. Managed C++ does.

it means it's a ref type (in managed c++ as already been mentioned)

^ in C++ is an binary Xor operator though :)
So C++ does have a ^, just not in relation to pointer/reference.

IN managed C++, the right terminology would be saying that name^ is a handle to an object on the managed heap.

Is there a difference in the CSharp reference and managed C++ handle(^)? In other words what is the difference between a reference to object and handle to object? I understand that this is not a managed C++ forum and I would rarely ever work on that, yet it would be great if I get a short answer....
Thanks
Bhushan

C# reference and C++/CLI handle are exactly the same.
All .NET languages are translated to the same Intermediate Language (MSIL), they are different only by syntax.