een chosen to provide <span class="bold"><strong>consistency among initialization
          states</strong></span> even at the expense of lack of consistency with the semantics
          of bare C++ references. It is true that <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">optional</span><span class="special">&lt;</span><span class="identifier">U</span><span class="special">&gt;</span></code> strives to behave as much as possible
          as <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">U</s