Pedantic gcc warning: type qualifiers on function return type

Question

When I compiled my C++ code with GCC 4.3 for the first time, (after having compiled it successfully with no warnings on 4.1, 4.0, 3.4 with the -Wall -Wextra opt

Answer 1

Returning a constant value only makes sense when you return a reference or a pointer(in this case pointer to constant and not a constant pointer) because the caller is able to modify the referenced (pointed to) value.

Another comment on the code not related to your question: I think it's better to use a setter instead of

int& getNonconstReference() {
    return _myInt;
}

Which will should be:

void setMyInt(int n) {
  _myInt = n;
}

Moreover, it's useless to return a const reference to an int. It does make sense for a bigger object whose copy or move is more expensive.