I don't fully grasp what you are trying to do here. This looks familiar though: > What I have specifically is a class that provides a base set of operations an

I don't fully grasp what you are trying to do here. This looks familiar though: > What I have specifically is a class that provides a base set of operations and a subclass that lets you do some modifications If you actually do this with public inheritance then you possibly break const correctness. Having to separate types for the immutable and mutable data structures with appropriate conversions is a sound idea though.