cv (const-volatility) specifiers

 

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• const - defines that the type is constant.
• volatile - defines that the type is volatile.
• mutable - defines that a member of a class does not affect the externally visible state of the class. mutable members can be modified in constant classes, that is constness is essentially ignored for the particular member.

Explanation

Note: cv-qualifiers and cv-specifiers (list above) are not the same thing.
The cv-qualifiers are properties of a type whereas cv-specifiers are language feature to define cv-qualifiers

Cv-qualifiers define two basic properties of a type: constness and volatility. A cv-qualifer can be one of the following: 'const volatile', 'const', 'volatile' or 'none'. const defines that a type is constant, volatile defines that the type is volatile. Non-constant and non-volatile type has no additional restrictions, whereas constant and volatile imply the following:

• constant - the object shall not be modified. Attempt to do so results in undefined behavior. On most compilers it is compile-time error.
• volatile - the object can be modified by means not detectable by the compiler and thus some compiler optimizations must be disabled.

There is partial ordering of cv-qualifiers by the order of increasing restrictions. The type can be said more or less cv-qualified then:

• unqualified < const
• unqualified < volatile
• unqualified < const volatile
• const < const volatile
• volatile < const volatile

Any cv-qualifiers are part of the type definition, hence types with different cv-qualifications are always different types. Therefore casting is needed to match types when assigning variables, calling functions, etc. Only casting to more cv-qualified type is done automatically as part of implicit conversions. In particular, the following conversions are allowed:

• unqualified type can be converted to const
• unqualified type can be converted to volatile
• unqualified type can be converted to const volatile
• const type can be converted to const volatile
• volatile type can be converted to const volatile

To convert to a less cv-qualified type, const_cast must be used.

Keywords

const, volatile, mutable