When you lie to your compiler, don’t be surprised to get results those differ from what you expect.

In this case, the coder promised his/her compiler the value of “value” won’t be changed, as it was declared const.

Therefore our best friend (yes, the compiler) who trusted the coder, thought “hey, I could cache this value in a register and not fetch it from RAM every time I reference it”, i.e. optimization.

If we change the code in the link slightly, so that function funcC would print *value before the assignment, one would see that the value of *value had actually been modified by function funcA. However, the modification was not visible in main, because the compiler was lied to as the coder explicitly told it that there would be no modification to value.

In the body of function funcC, though value was declared as a pointer to const instance, the compiler was smart enough to know it was lied to. There was a const_cast and a assignment, therefore, the modification to *value was reflected in the output.