My understanding is that const was depricated for the same reason that register is - the compiler is in a much better position to judge what data is constant than the programmer.
The one place where it would have been very useful (to me) was writing ROMable embedded code, but these days with 32bit embedded CPUs I don't have physicially readonly data. To cap this the last time I did use a 16bit cpu and tried to do this, examination of the assembly proved the (name deleted) compiler was too dumb to take advantage. -Steve
