Passing an address to a class and from there to its "child-class" by reference in C++

Question

"pointer" holds the address of "Int". I want to pass that address to my given classes by reference:

class N {
public:
    N(int &pPointer){   
        std::cout << "Address: " << &(pPointer) <<" 
";
    }
};
class M {
public:
    M(int &pPointer):n(pPointer) {              
       std::cout << "Address: " << &pPointer <<" 
";
    }   
    private:
     N n;
};

int main () {
    int Int = 5;
    int *pointer = &Int;    
    std::cout << "Address: " << pointer <<" 
";
    M m(*pointer);  
     return 0;
}

Is this a good practice (since I'm kind of using a reference to a dereferenced pointer)? Or is it absolutely horrible? I simply want to avoid pointers here. (Although I'm forced to use "*pointer" in the beginning. )

Answer 1

It's totally OK to pass by reference instead of passing by pointer to use the abject later, as lon you know the pointer you are using is valid. This allows you to skip the nullptr check, because references can't be null.
However if you store a reference, you won't be able to replace the object being referred to, to another. But you can do that with a pointer.
You can, later, take the address of the referenced object, but do you really think you need to do that? Because you can use the reference instead