>The point here is that I didn't know Nigel was speaking of objects; I replied to his message thinking he was speaking of variables. Anyways, not too important.
>
>To say "you pass an object by reference" means the same thing as "you pass an object reference" as far as I'm concerned.
>

There is a huge difference, regardless of your interpretation; pass by reference indicates that the function/method receiving the parameter receives the address of the parameter, as opposed to pass by value, in which case the function/method receives the address of a copy of the value of the parameter.

>As far as creating and then destoying an object in the calling routine, that is not really passing the object. That is just creating something that will be in scope in the called function. But your meaning is understood.
>

I don't think you do. There are languages that permit you to pass an object by value; this means that the receiving function/method gets the address of a copy of the object, as opposed to the address of the copy of an object pointer value. The object passed by value in this case would have a lifespan of the parameter's validity, as opposed to an object reference passed by value as is the case with VFP pass by value, as opposed to the address of the object pointer, the case of VFP's pass by reference. And you absolutely need to understand this difference, since it's an important concept for little unimportant issues like COM!