c++ - Is it possible to disallow taking a reference to an object

Question

I want to do the opposite of making instances of a class noncopyable, that is, make sure that instances of a particular class can be passed only as a copy and not as a reference. If any function tries to receive it by reference, I would like it to give a compilation error (ideally) or a run time error.

I dont think making operator & private is going to do it, is there a legitimate way of doing this.

Answer 1

That's impossible. Any named variable can bind to a reference variable of the appropriate type. That's just how the language works.

In particular, you could never have a copy constructor with your restriction, so you couldn't actually pass the object by value!