const char* mission

What this C++ const pointer question tests

This is a medium-difficulty C++ language-knowledge question that examines your grasp of pointer and const semantics. It rewards precision: the distinction between a const pointer, a pointer to const, and a const pointer to const is subtle but critical in production code, and interviewers use questions like this to verify you can reason about them accurately.

To work through this, you need to parse the declaration carefully, understand what gets printed (or whether the code compiles at all), and articulate why. The question tests whether you can read C++ type declarations fluently and predict runtime or compile-time behaviour from them.

• Pointer-to-const vs. const-pointer distinctions
• Type safety and const correctness
• Compilation vs. runtime errors in C++