>You don't always want to abstract away instances, as people have pointed out in other posts.
You do when the very basis of Class Based Object Oriented Programming is to maintain unique identity of class instances.
I have not seen any valid reasons to refer to the value of an object instance.
>Not every language abstracts everything. Your complaint seems to be that C++ makes you type a little more than other languages, and that's true. That verbosity provides finer degrees of control.
Class Based Object Oriented Programming languages should abstract the very basic workings of Classes in Object Oriented Programming.
How is greater control accomplished when working with object instances in a practical manner?
>This all just seems to be an argument of personal preferences.
It is a discussion about how C++ drops the ball on a fundamental of Class Based Object Oriented Programming.
>but you should just say so instead of turning it into this issue of C++ having some sort of fundamental problem.
Except that I have explained some of the fundamentals of Class Based Object Oriented Programming and how C++ does not adhere to those fundamentals by defaults.