When the & operator is used in a declaration form, preceded by a type it doesn't mean "the address of" but a "reference to" which is essentially an automatically dereferenced pointer with disabled pointer arithmetic.
There are no references in C, so if you want to pass or return by reference, you had to pass a const pointer and dereference it to access the pointed to value. C++ added references to make this concept easier, to prevent accidental walking off the address with pointer arithmetic, and to save the need to dereference the pointer. This makes working with it much easier and resulting in cleaner and more readable syntax.
