Is this documented behaviour?

[John Colvin]

On Wednesday, 24 July 2013 at 14:52:53 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
> On Tuesday, 23 July 2013 at 20:13:33 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 23 July 2013 at 17:06:37 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, 23 July 2013 at 17:03:52 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
>>>> Sorry, I should have been more clear. It's the first case 
>>>> that seems weird to me.
>>>
>>> Why? '*aptr' is 'a' pretty much by definition of pointer 
>>> dereferencing.
>>
>> To be honest, I wasn't expecting foo(*aptr) to compile at all, 
>> with a "taking address of temporary" error or similar.
>>
>> It's clearly the right behaviour to allow it, but it took me 
>> by surprise at first.
>
> "Pass-by-Ref" is pretty much sugar for "pass-pointer-by-value".
>
> Basically, if you can take the address of the argument, then 
> passing it is fair game. It's because you can't take the 
> address of a temporary that you can't pass a temporary by ref 
> (unless you are Microsoft Visual Studio, then there's no 
> problem at all apparently 0_o).
>
> Of course, "*aptr" does not return a temporary, so passing that 
> is fair game too.

I'm actually amazed how many years I've had the wrong conception 
of pointers in my head.

Despite having written *ptr = val a million times, I was still 
imagining *ptr to  be an rvalue i.e. 
read-from-this-address-and-return-value. How on earth did I never 
make the connection?!