Address of a reference

Question

So I am having a discussion with a friend about reference and pointers.

What we got talking about is \"you can take an address of a pointer but you cant take an addr

Answer 1

The unary operator & returns the address of the designated object. Reference is not an object. It is reference to object. So this statement

cout << &xRef << &x <

outputs in the both cases the address of the designated object that is of x. Even though the compiler can allocate memory for a reference the reference itself has no address That is you can not apply operator & that to get its address. It is the object (or a function) that is referenced to by a reference that has an address.