&

In HTML it is can be written: &
ASCII values:

decimal 38

hex 0x26

octal 0046

binary 00100110

• The Intercal ASCII pronunciation guide calls this character the "Hitchcock", for obvious reasons.
• In BBC BASIC, & was used as a prefix for a hexadecimal number: &1234 was (decimal) 4660.
• In C, you can apply the unary operator & to an lvalue, yielding a pointer to that lvalue.
• In C (and, by inheritance or analogy, in C++, Perl and many other UNIXoid programming languages) the binary operator & to two integer values to get their bitwise AND. Thus, 0x1234 & 0x4321 == 0x0220.

Also, in some shells (at least in Bourne shell derivatives) &-ending commands go into background, making them behave like daemons (the Jargon File sense). See the connection? =)

$ long-running-command &
(echoes the PID)
$

...would make the system run the command, but while it's running the command you are immediately returned to the shell prompt (CLI) for further trip.

• bitwise and (syn: bitand) which combines the bits of two values using the logical and operation
• the unary address of operator, which gives the memory address of the next item.
• In C++, variables declared with an & at the end of the type are references, which act like dereferenced pointers but have the syntax of normal variables.

Ok, so it serves three purposes in C++.