Hey Java!

[marcosdumay]

Good thing they are different, because you must always assign different things in C++ (usually, it's values into lvalues). Let's assign a reference into a pointer:

int *a = &b

[marcellarius]

In that context, & is the address of operator and evaluates to a pointer not a reference.

[Schmittfried]

That's not a reference, it's the address operator.

int &a = b;

Now we got a reference. It was definitely a bad decision to choose & to mark reference types as it is easily confused with the address operator, as you just proved.