no. I always use const_cast in my own code. so that is why I believe it might be there for a reason.

Speaking from my own experience, I've found that people use C-style casts because theyre lazy OR they don't understand what they want to do. The latter is really scary sometimes but its normal. Anyway, because I am dealing with a legacy C api, sometimes I have to const_cast to call these functions, but marking these with const_cast makes the casts easy to look for.