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From: Bo Persson <bo@bo-persson.se>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: I think references should have been const by default
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2021 12:33:37 +0200
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c++:82067

On 2021-10-25 at 11:47, Juha Nieminen wrote:
> RacingRabbit@watershipdown.co.uk wrote:
>> Consts in C are pointless because it doesn't have references and its rather
>> difficult to "accidentaly" dereference a pointer to update the value its
>> pointing to.
> 
> Actually it isn't. Very old-style C code, mostly prior to the C89 standard,
> but you can see even modern examples sometimes (for some old-school C coders
> habits die hard), often used non-const pointers to char as "strings".
> In fact, I think even the K&R famous book as examples with non-const char*'s
> being initialized to point to string literals.
> 

In defense of K&R.  :-)

They didn't have const in original C. It was Bjarne who first added it 
to C++, and only later did C also adopt the keyword.