Pedantic gcc warning: type qualifiers on function return type

Question

When I compiled my C++ code with GCC 4.3 for the first time, (after having compiled it successfully with no warnings on 4.1, 4.0, 3.4 with the -Wall -Wextra opt

Answer 1

This warning is also useful to avoid confusion when declaring functions returning pointers to objects which should not be modified:

// "warning: type qualifiers ignored on function return type"
// as the pointer is copied. 
Foo* const bar();

// correct:
const Foo* bar();