Using c++ references for nicer code

It is common to see castings and conversions between different types of primitives in c++ code.
Many times however you don't want to do any conversion of the value, but instead just want to reference the binary representation of the variable as another type.

The common ugly way to do this is something like this:

// Program Entry Point
int main() {

    // Make x hold the binary representation of a 
    // positive infinity float
    int x = 0x7f800000;

    // Treat x as if it was holding a float instead of an int,
    // and then give f the same value
    float f = *(float*)&x;

    // Print float f (positive infinity) to the console
    cout << f << endl;
    return 0;
}

This does work, however as you can see the second line of code is pretty ugly.
The reason you can't just do "float f = (float)x;", is because that would mean you're casting the int value to a float; so the value is actually converted to a floating point value.

But that's not what we wanted, we instead want the 'int x' to behave as it was a float the entire time; that is why we first take the address of 'x' (&x), then treat it as a float pointer ((float*)&x), then finally dereference it back (*(float*)&x).

With c++ however, you can use references to simplify this whole procedure.

// Program Entry Point
int main() {

    // Make x hold the binary representation of a 
    // positive infinity float
    int x = 0x7f800000;

    // Treat x as if it was holding a float instead of an int,
    // and then give f the same value
    float f = (float&)x;

    // Print float f (positive infinity) to the console
    cout << f << endl;
    return 0;
}

This trick was taught to me by Jake Stine from pcsx2, and its something not a lot of coders know apparently, because I commonly see people using the ugly-way to do this instead.
Most-likely because you can't do this in normal C (just another reason why C sucks compared to C++ xD).