How to call a non-const function within a const function (C++)

Question

I have a legacy function that looks like this:

int Random() const
{
  return var_ ? 4 : 0;
}

and I need to call a function within that lega

Answer 1

There are two possibilities here. First, newCall and ALL of its callees are in fact non-modifying functions. In that case you should absolutely go through and mark them all const. Both you and future code maintainers will thank you for making it much easier to read the code (speaking from personal experience here). Second, newCall DOES in fact mutate the state of your object (possibly via one of the functions it calls). In this case, you need to break API and make Random non-const to properly indicate to callers that it modifies the object state (if the modifications only affect physical constness and not logical constness you could use mutable attributes and propagate const).