oh okay, understood. frankly I don't have an airtight understanding of the c++ standards and I would have considered your expression to be a dereference operation on an lvalue, but not an lvalue itself. ty for the explanation!
I'm sure there are some complex exceptions, but as a starter, you can think of lvalues as "anything you can assign to" (the l basically stands for left, as in, "can appear on the left of an assignment"). So, if you have something like `foo(val) = 10`, then `foo(val)` is an lvalue.
