How to generate a non-const method from a const method?

Question

While striving for const-correctness, I often find myself writing code such as this

class Bar;

class Foo {
public:
  const Bar* bar() const { /* code that gets          


        

Answer 1

Your code implies that the const bar() is actually creating and returning a new Bar, and I find that peculiar if you're doing that lot.

For me a bigger problem is that constness in a member function is limited to reference and non-pointer members. The moment you have (non-const) pointer members, a const function can change them even though it claims to be const on the box.

If your Bar instance is a member variable, consider returning a reference instead.