A question regarding char*&

[superbonzo]

I don't quite understand your reasoning. Since a char array might be convertiable to a char*, so why is it a problem that it is not a char*?

in technical terms, the problem is that the pointer to which the array decays is an r-value and you can't bind a non const reference to an r-value. For example, if you change foo signature to "void foo( char* const&)" then it will compile.