It’s the same as not being able to take the address of 5
even though you can take the address of an int
after giving it the value 5
. It doesn’t matter that there’s no alternative value for a nullptr_t
to have.
Values don’t have addresses; objects do.
A temporary object is generated when you pass such a value to a const &
parameter, or otherwise bind a value to a const reference, such as by static_cast< T const & >( … )
or declaring a named reference T const & foo = …;
. The address you’re seeing is that of the temporary.