Why is it impossible to have a reference-to-void?

Question

Why is it impossible to have a reference to void? The only thing I found in the C++ Standard is this line, at 8.3.2.1

A declarator th

Answer 1

You can think of a reference as a de-referenced pointer. Syntactically you treat a reference as though it is not a pointer: you do not need the * operator to dereference it, and you can use . rather than -> to access its members.

However, you cannot dereference a void pointer. As pointed out by Binary Worrier trying to do that will give you a compiler error. And if you cannot have a dereferenced void pointer, that means you cannot have a void reference.