C/C++ changing the value of a const

Question

I had an article, but I lost it. It showed and described a couple of C/C++ tricks that people should be careful. One of them interested me but now that I am trying to repli

Answer 1

Back in the mists of time, we paleo-programmers used FORTRAN. FORTRAN passed all its parameters by reference, and didn't do any typechecking. This meant it was quite easy to accidentally change the value of even a literal constant. You could pass "3" to a SUBROUTINE, and it would come back changed, and so every time from then on where your code had a "3", it would actually act like a different value. Let me tell you, those were hard bugs to find and fix.