Writers sometimes prefer to use the form back-reference when documenting regular expressions.

Before the hearing, she submitted a character reference from her former employer describing her integrity and work ethic.

Call-by-reference is an evaluation strategy in which the arguments to a function are evaluated first, and a pointer to the result is passed to the function.

I had to visit the reference library because the rare atlases there are non-circulating and cannot be checked out.

When calibrating the telescope's photometry, we observed the reference star whose magnitude had been measured to high precision.

Many university departments maintain small reference libraries for students researching niche topics.

During the panel discussion, her repeated self-references undermined her credibility.

The compiler reported several forward references that needed to be resolved before linking.

The spreadsheet crashed because of circular references in several formulas.

The compiler reported a forward reference when the function was called before it was declared.