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=== Methods ===
In order to take advantage of the [[design by contract]] approach for user-defined types (structs and classes), which can have methods as well as member data, the programmer may tag instance methods as <code>const</code> if they don't modify the object's data members.
Applying the <code>const</code> qualifier to instance methods thus is an essential feature for const-correctness, and is not available in many other [[Object-oriented programming|object-oriented]] languages such as [[Java (programming language)|Java]] and [[C Sharp (programming language)|C#]] or in [[Microsoft]]'s [[C++/CLI]] or [[Managed Extensions for C++]].
While <code>const</code> methods can be called by <code>const</code> and non-<code>const</code> objects alike, non-<code>const</code> methods can only be invoked by non-<code>const</code> objects.
The <code>const</code> modifier on an instance method applies to the object pointed to by the "<code>[[this (computer science)|this]]</code>" pointer, which is an implicit argument passed to all instance methods.
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