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The dot and arrow operator are both used in C++ to access the members of a class or structure. They are just used in different scenarios. In C++, types declared as class, struct, or union are considered "of class type". So the following refers to all three of them. - a.b is only used if b is a member of the object (or reference to an object) a. So for a.b, a will always be an actual object (or a reference to an object) of a class. - a-\>b is essentially a shorthand notation for (\*a).b, i.e., if a is a pointer to an object, then a-\>b is accessing the property b of the object that a points to. Note that dot cannot be overloaded but -\> can be overloaded, so we can define our own function(operator-\>()) that should be called when this operator is used. so if a is an object of a class that overloads operator-\> (common such types are smart pointers and iterators), then the meaning is whatever the class designer implemented. References are, semantically, aliases to objects, so I should have added "or reference to a pointer" to the as well. However, I thought this would be more confusing than helpful, since references to pointers (T\*&) are rarely ever used. ## Example Code ``` #include<iostream> class A { public: int b; A() { b = 5; } }; int main() { A a = A(); A* x = &a; std::cout << "a.b = " << a.b << "\n"; std::cout << "x->b = " << x->b << "\n"; return 0; } ``` ## Output ``` 5 5 ```