Why is queue a pointer variable in Queue Management assignment (parts 1 and 2) (C++)

Question

I have finished Queue Management parts 1 and 2 in the C++ course, but I am treating q.queue and q.size the same way I would do if I didn't know about pointers.

The class Queue contains:

class Queue {
int size;
int* queue;

(...)

And I solved Part 2 (operator method) as below. I have called both size and queue with the "this" element.
So what is the difference between the two variables? One is a pointer, so it should be treated differently somehow?

Or, as I suspect, when we access q.queue[i], we are implicitly using the i-th element of the array by reference?

Queue operator+(Queue q2) {

// Create Queue object to return
Queue q3;

// Fill q3 from q1 info
q3.size = this->size;
q3.queue = this->queue;

// Fill the rest of the queue with the second object
for (int i = 0; i < q2.size; i++) {
q3.queue[q3.size] = q2.queue[i];
q3.size++;

}

// Output of function
return q3;

}

Answer 1

The <queue> member is defined as int pointer because it will be initialized dynamically in constructor as data storage (with 100 free slots), using dynamic memory allocation approach.

`this -> size` and `this -> queue` refer to the <size> and <queue> member in the scope of current object, the object on which the overloaded operator was called upon.