Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In programming language theory, a reference type is a data type that can only be accessed by references. Unlike objects of value types, objects of reference types cannot be directly embedded into composite objects and are always dynamically allocated. They are usually destroyed automatically after they become unreachable. For immutable objects, the distinction between reference type to an immutable object type and value type is sometimes unclear, because a reference type variable to an immutable object behaves with the same semantics as a value type variable—for example, in both cases the "value" of the data the variable represents can only be changed by direct assignment to the variable (whereas for mutable objects, the data could be changed by modifying the object through another reference to the object).

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