Question

There’s a class that exposes some of its functionallity and data via another connected class’ object returned by value.
For example a container type that returns iterators class through begin() and end() methods. It returns iterator by value so

iterator begin();
const iterator begin() const;

won’t work and we need two separate classes iterator and const_iterator but then the principle of code reusing is being violated as we need to implement similar functionality in both classes.

Are there any workarounds? How to find a compromise between code reuse and reserving a constancy?

Answer 1

No. I have never seen it done any other way than creating const and non-const versions of functions and classes.