There's also two places you can put "int" in a function declaration, but nobody ever seems to complain about that ;) I'm not even sure I understand the rant, t

There's also two places you can put "int" in a function declaration, but nobody ever seems to complain about that ;) I'm not even sure I understand the rant, though I've been a fan of const for years so it's probably automatic by now. So, say you have a class with a const member, and you have to pass it in to a function? Well, that's a bit unusual - const members are pretty rare in my experience. But the underlying problem sounds like: you have a const object, and you want to pass it into a function. There are three possibilities, I suppose: 1. The function takes const T & or const T * , because it doesn't change that argument. So no problem. 2. The function takes T, because it doesn't change that argument (and the object is small and/or the programmer doesn't care about the copying - irrelevant issues here). So no problem. 3. The function takes T & or T * , because it changes that argument. Compilation fails! But - no problem! Because this is what you want. You passed what's supposedly a const object into a function that expected to be able to change it. Obviously compilation has to fail. So maybe the problem is people declaring parameters as T & or T * , when they meant const T & or const T * ? I bet if C++ had const by default, this problem would never arise. We'd be striding, right now, arm in arm, towards our glorious const-filled destiny, singing a song about it as we went.