> However the other related question remains:  What does the C standard
> say is default implied type of a string literal when used as an
> initializer for a pointer type (as opposed to the array type above)?

You answered this yourself:

> If I understand correctly the only thing you said with respect to
> this question was:

>> A string literal forms an array of static storage duration with
>> elements of type char or wchar_t.  const isn't mentioned in the
>> section on string literals at all.

There you are: its type is "array of char" or "array of wchar_t",
depending on whether or not it's a wide string literal.

> However this would mean that ISO/IEC 9899:1990 does not agree with
> GCC in practice (i.e. by default and then -fwritable-strings is not
> used)

By default?  No, only when -Wwrite-strings is used.  Yes, this means
that gcc -Wwrite-strings does not conform to the standard; neither does
any invocation of gcc without -ansi -pedantic (and possibly not even
that).

> and it would also mean that these three examples are not identical
> w.r.t. the "const" qualifiers

>   {                          {                     char *foo;
>     char *foo = "string";      char *foo;          bar(char *tmp)
>   }                            foo = "string";     {
>                              }                       foo = tmp;
>                                                    }
>                                                    {
>                                                      bar("string");
>                                                    }

They are identical with respect to const.  Without -Wwrite-strings,
they all are fine; with -Wwrite-strings, each one discards a const
(which may or may not provoke a warning depending on other options).

> (You can implicitly, and in a non-portable way, get the address of a
> string literal used as an intializer IFF your compiler uses shared
> addresses for identical string literals.  :-)

If you mean "initializer for char *", it's an expression like any other
expression (in this regard); if you mean "initializer for char []", no,
the double-quoted string does not have storage of its own - only the
array it initializes has storage.  (I'm not sure whether it technically
is included in the term `string literal'.)

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B