Why is ‘this’ a pointer and not a reference?

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When the language was first evolving, in early releases with real users, there were no references, only pointers. References were added when operator overloading was added, as it requires references to work consistently.

One of the uses of this is for an object to get a pointer to itself. If it was a reference, we’d have to write &this. On the other hand, when we write an assignment operator we have to return *this, which would look simpler as return this. So if you had a blank slate, you could argue it either way. But C++ evolved gradually in response to feedback from a community of users (like most successful things). The value of backward compatibility totally overwhelms the minor advantages/disadvantages stemming from this being a reference or a pointer.

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