With the Rogue Wave libraries, information generally flows into a function via its arguments and out through a return value. Most functions do not modify their arguments. Indeed, if an argument is passed by value or as a const reference:

you can be confident that the argument will not be modified. However, if an argument is passed as a non-const reference, you may find that the function will modify it.

If an argument is passed in as a pointer, there is the strong possibility that the function will retain a copy of the pointer. This is typical of the collection classes:

The function retains a copy of the pointer to remind you that the collection will be retaining a pointer to the object after the function returns.

An alternative design strategy would be to pass objects that are to be inserted into a collection by reference, as in The NIH Classes. We rejected this approach for two reasons: it looks so similar to pass-by-value that the programmer could forget about the retained reference, and it becomes too easy to store a reference to a stack-based variable.