Dan Saks wrote about this in 1995, during the lead up to C++ standardisation:
The committees decided that functions such as this, that accept a
pointer or reference to an array with unknown bound, complicate
declaration matching and overload resolution rules in C++. The
committees agreed that, since such functions have little utility and
are fairly uncommon, it would be simplest to just ban them. Hence, the
C++ draft now states:If the type of a parameter includes a type of the form pointer to
array of unknown bound of T or reference to array of unknown bound of
T, the program is ill-formed.