Your char a[4] is not more readable and sooner or later you'll get screwed by strlen(a) or some such. It's quite telling that the construct is not legal in c++.
Why would I run strlen() on the second one but not on the first one? Presumably I know that I defined an array of chars and not a cstring? Or if I forget, couldn't I forget in the first case too? Once I defined it, they're both just char[4]s.
