No, it could be mutable variable referenced/accessed (not sure of the right word here) in a function via either a reference-to-const or a pointer-to-const. It

No, it could be mutable variable referenced/accessed (not sure of the right word here) in a function via either a reference-to-const or a pointer-to-const. It seems highly non-intuitive to me that casting away constness works differently depending on whether the variable was defined const or not, but if that's the rules, that's the rules.