title: Passing a reference to a constructor
body: <p>I have five text files that need to be loaded into memory.  I set up a method in the main class that loads them into a some strings and stores them in a list.  I need to call another method that will use the files loaded into memory.  When I pass the List to the method, does it use it as a reference or does it copy the List to a new List object, essentially duplicating the data? I need to know because I call this method 500 or so times.</p>