It seems we've just discovered the reason why the pre-CWG2801 wording was the way it was. Sigh.

We should probably

• restore the old wording,
• then change the part that says "cv1 shall be the same cv-qualification as, or greater cv-qualification than, cv2" to "cv1 T1 shall be reference-compatible with cv2 T2". I think that fixes the original issue.
• then, add a note so that in a few years we don't forget why this wording is here.

On Wed, Oct 8, 2025 at 11:55 AM Ell via Std-Discussion <std-discussion@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:

AFAICT, after the changes from CWG 2801, none of the bullets in
[dcl.init.ref]/5 allow initializing a (const/rv) reference from a
similarly-typed bit field. I'm pretty sure that wasn't intended.
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Brian Bi