In C++, dereferencing a pointer doesn&#x27;t give you a value: it gives you a &quot;reference&quot;. While a compiler is possibly allowed to do so, I would be shocked to the point of saying &quot;this compiler doesn&#x27;t work&quot; at a compiler that actually went out of its way, even with optimizations turned off (as this isn&#x27;t an optimization issue), to access the memory at the address of the pointer in any way if the reference was never actually used.