On Friday, August 17, 2012 03:59:01 Chris Cain wrote: > If you're absolutely 100% completely totally certain that the > data is mutable (i.e., you have confirmed either through good, > sound reasoning OR you have some method of seeing exactly where > it is stored in your RAM and you've checked that the place it is > stored is writable memory), then __technically__, yes you can > cast away and modify away. Apparently, according to some, it's > necessary for low level programming. I'd highly discourage this > type of behavior because if you're doing something like that I'm > nearly certain you could come up with a better design, not to > mention you're missing the point of having something const in the > first place.
It's still technically undefined behavior. It's just that there's pretty much no way that the compiler is going to be written in a way that it won't work. However, you _do_ still risk running into problems because the compiler may make optimizations that you're violating by modifying the object. So, even if you're _certain_ that the object is actually mutable and you're _certain_ that nothing will blow up when you cast away const and modify it, you _still_ could get bugs due to compiler optimizations. - Jonathan M Davis
