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The language doesn't define "correct const usage" the way you see it. It only specifies what is defined and undefined behavior. Casting a pointer-to-const to a pointer-to-non-const and modifying an object via that is defined behavior as long as the original object is not declared const. (see my comment above)

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And that's where functional programming languages are gaining over imperative/oo languages for multi-threaded behavior. Because you have the ability to break the contract, it produces code that is harder to follow, harder to learn for beginners, and harder to debug in parallel/concurrent contexts.

It's a shame that this is more best practice. Hopefully the specification will address this in the future that you can only call const from const, and cast from const to non-const can't be used.

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