I'm afraid that finding references is a lot more complicated than finding syntax-agnostic substrings. Though it would be immensely cool (especially since non-patched occurrence highlighting doesn't do 1-character and 2-character selections, such as variable names like i, or pt, or it).
What would be even more helpful would be a feature to select all references, rather than highlighting them. Code::Blocks already supports non-standard selections and typing into all of them simultaneously. Now, for intuitive, quick-and-failsafe renaming, all one needs is "select all references".