Modifying an existing array with a function

[nuzzle]

This is only my opinion and I know a lot of people, including the designers of the STL, disagree with me but I think references are vastly overused. In most cases, all they are doing is hiding a pointer so the programmer doesn't have to explicity use * and ->.

Well, the designers of Java agree with you. In Java there's no by-reference parameter passing at all. It's always by-value (like in C). And the syntax is adapted to this so there's no notion of pointer either. References in C++ were introduced primarily to support operator overloading which is not available in Java.

So the problem is you cannot have the versability of C++ without the complexity. You either must learn to live with it (using a coding standard helps), or you must switch to something simpler like Java.