Reference to an unnamed temporary object (life time)

Question

After reading this answer from ildjarn, I wrote the following example, and it looks like an unnamed temporary object has the same life time as its reference!

• H

Answer 1

How come this is possible?

Because the standard says so, because it's deemed useful. rvalue references and const lvalue references extend the lifetime of temporaries:

[C++11: 12.2/5]: [..] The temporary to which the reference is bound or the temporary that is the complete object of a subobject to which the reference is bound persists for the lifetime of the reference, except [..]

and exhaustive wording in [C++11: 8.5.3/5] requires that we shall not bind temporaries to non-const lvalue references.

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Is it specified in the C++ standard? Which version?

Yes. All of them.