"Barry" wrote:
> What's the point that the language constrains on this?

The point is to avoid having an object in an indeterminate state which can't
get out of it. What would the point of your code be? As the snippet from the
standard clearly states the object will be in an indeterminate state because
it's a POD-class, and since you declared it const you can't change it, so
you'd simply have an unusable object.