This part of the C++ Standard says: Evaluating a throw-expression with an operand throws an exception; the type of the exception object is determined by removing any top-level cv-qualifiers from the static type of the operand and adjusting the type from “array of T” or function type T to “pointer to T” .
One might think that this passage implies that if we are dealing with the operand of type const char[3] , the const qualifier will be removed from it and then char[3] will be adjusted to type char* .