Additional notes (March, 2023)

Forwarded to EWG for consideration via cplusplus/papers#1494 by decision of the CWG chair.

Paper P0960R3 enabled initialization of aggregates (including arrays) from parenthesized expression lists. The rather similar case of initializating a reference to an aggregate was not addressed. For example:

  const int (&ra)[2](1,2);

There is no evidence in 9.4.1 [dcl.init.general] paragraph 16 that such support is intended, nor does 9.4.4 [dcl.init.ref] paragraph 5 admit an initializer other than a (single) expression for a reference.

There is implementation divergence: gcc accepts, others reject. Also, the parenthesized aggregate initialization paper P0960R3 apparently originally envisioned a textual transformation to a braced-init-list, which presumably would have permitted the example. It is not clear whether the reference case was intentionally or accidentially dropped during the multiple revisions of the paper.