I don't think that it was a specific design decision to make '==' be a pointer comparison instead of value comparison. It's simply a consequence of the much mor

I don't think that it was a specific design decision to make '==' be a pointer comparison instead of value comparison. It's simply a consequence of the much more general design decision that operators cannot be overloaded. `a==b` is always an analog for the C code `a==b`, not `* a==*b` and certainly not C++'s `operator==(a, b)`