Quoth myself on Jan 18 at 9:12 pm: > Quoth Jani Nikula on Jan 19 at 12:25 am: > > FWIW, I'm not a big fan of casting away const. Either it is const, or it > > isn't. Not very many places would be affected if you dropped the const > > qualifier from the related interface(s) altogether, and things would > > look cleaner here. But I suppose this is a matter of taste. > > I'm not particularly happy with this either. Unfortunately, dropping > the const here affects a surprising number of places, including the > entire MIME node API. I've changed my mind and removed a few consts so that this funny cast isn't necessary. (It also turned out that when I tried this before, I'd given up just a smidgen before removing enough consts to make it work.) > I think that, at a deep level, depth-first numbering simply doesn't > resonate with an extremely hierarchical API like this and that > dissonance is going to have to focus somewhere. There have been > discussions of switching to hierarchical part numbering before (in > particular, because depth-first numbering is unstable with encrypted > parts) and I'll probably restart those after all of this is done. I have not, however, changed my mind about this.