Question

Once I read in a statement that

The language feature that “sealed the
deal” to include references is
operator overloading.

Why are references needed to effectively support operator overloading?? Any good explanation?

Answer 1

Here’s what Stroustrup said in “The Design and Evolution of C++” (3.7 “references”):

References were introduced primarily to support operator overloading. …

C passes every function argument by value, and where passing an object by value would be inefficient or inappropriate the user can pass a pointer . This strategy doesn’t work where operator overloading is used. In that case, notational convenience is essential because users cannot be expected to insert address-of operators if the objects are large. For example:

 a = b - c;

is acceptable (that is, conventional) notation, but

 a = &b - &c;

is not. Anyway, &b - &c already has a meaning in C, and I didn’t want to change that.