Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

Section 7.9 Pass-By-Value vs. Pass-By-Reference

• When an argument is passed by reference (p. 265), the called method can access the argument’s value in the caller directly and possibly modify it.

• All arguments in Java are passed by value. A method call can pass two types of values to a method—copies of primitive values and copies of references to objects. Although an object’s reference is passed by value (p. 265), a method can still interact with the referenced object by calling its public methods using the copy of the object’s reference.

• To pass an object reference to a method, simply specify in the method call the name of the variable that refers to the object.

• When you pass an array or an individual array element of a reference type ...