const

[Walter Bright]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Ditto. Come on, even non-programmers know what "read only access" means.
> I find it hard to believe there would be many people who'd have trouble 
> grasping the idea that "read only" means "look but don't touch". Are 
> there any languages where 'readonly' is used for putting values into 
> ROM?

Yes, there are C extensions to do just that. Secondly, there is often 
hardware memory protection available, which has a "read only" bit. That 
means the data cannot be changed. Files marked "read only" cannot be 
written to by anyone. Read only has a long history of meaning immutable 
by anything, not just the viewer.

"The readonly storage-class modifier, like the const data-type 
qualifier, assigns the NOWRT attribute to the variable's program 
section; if used with the static or globaldef specifier, the variable is 
stored in the $CODE psect, which has the NOWRT attribute by default." -- 
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/c/docs/5492profile_017.html