Whoops, you've just exposed some sloppy thinking on my part. I should have said "reference to const pointer to const int", following the what-comes-before-it rule -- there's a const after the *, and the other one precedes the int but there's nothing before that, so it applies to the int.

For some reason, in my head that parses as "const reference". I suspect g++ error messages have something to do with it.

Thanks for the catch!