9The warnings are really a design bug in C’s const-qualifier rules when pointers point to other pointers. See question 11.10 in the (excellent!) comp.lang.c online FAQ (http://www.eskimo.com/ scs/C-faq/top.html) for further discussion. gcc 2.95.3 gives the spurious warnings, but gcc 3.2.1 doesn’t, nor does the Intel C compiler in any version I’ve tried. Also, C++ has fixed the problems in C’s const-qualifier rules, so the same code compiled as C++ shouldn’t give any warnings (and doesn’t on the compilers I’ve tried).