Full name of submitter (unless configured in github; will be published with the issue): Jiang An

Reference (section label): [dcl.init.general], [dcl.init.string]

[dcl.init.general] p16.3:

If the destination type is an array of characters, an array of char8_t, an array of char16_t, an array of char32_t, or an array of wchar_t, and the initializer is a string-literal, see [dcl.init.string].

[dcl.init.string] p1

An array of ordinary character type ([basic.fundamental]), char8_t array, char16_t array, char32_t array, or wchar_t array may be initialized by an ordinary string literal, UTF-8 string literal, UTF-16 string literal, UTF-32 string literal, or wide string literal, respectively, or by an appropriately-typed string-literal enclosed in braces ([lex.string]). [...]

The syntactic forms of such initializers are not very clear and there's implementation divergence.

"Good" forms:

• char a[] = "foo"; - accepted by all known implementations, and clarified to be valid in notes;
• char a[]("foo"); - accepted by all known implementations;
• char a[]{"foo"}; - accepted by all known (C++11 and later) implementations;
• char a[] = {"foo"}; - accepted by all known (C++11 and later) implementations.

Controversial forms with additonal parentheses:

• char a[] = ("foo"); - diagnosed by GCC (and EDG & Comeau per clang ("foo") accepted as char[] initializer llvm/llvm-project#8418); silently accepted by other implementations;
• char a[](("foo")); - likely same as above;
• char a[]{("foo")}; - likely same as above;
• char a[] = {("foo")}; - likely same as above.

Weird forms with additional braces:

• char arr[]{{"foo"}}; - accepted by MSVC and rejected by others;
• char arr[] = {{"foo"}}; - same as above.

It seems that we should clarify the permitted syntactic forms, which should include "good" and controversial forms and exclude weird forms.

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