Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that const is overall a good thing; however, it is tricky even in what you might think are simple cases. Take this for example: include void foo(const int& a, int& b) { std::cout Here the value of a changes in the middle of the function even though it's a const reference, because of aliasing. Here const doesn't mean the value won't change--only that you can't change it through that particular reference. Yes,…
You misunderstand reference-to-const, it does not imply that what "a" points to is immutable, it is a contract to the caller that foo will not use "a" in any non-const way.
That's exactly what I said; however, when you introduce people to C++ that seems rather counter-intuitive and can lead to a lot of mistakes. Yes, you can tell people "Well, you don't understand what the standard says!" but there's still something to be said for language features that don't take several pages to explain what they really do.