What is throwing the error the static or the const?

Question

The following code is throwing an error message and I can't figure out what the issue is - is it the word static, or const? What am I doing wrong?

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class SampleClass
{
private:

    int value;
    static int counter;

public:

    SampleClass(int i)
    {
        value = i; 
        counter++;
    }

    static int countSomeClass() const
    {
        return counter;
    }

    void showValue()
    {
        cout << value << endl;
    }

};

int main()
{
    SampleClass test(50);
    test.showValue();
    test.countSomeClass();
    return 0;
}

Error message:

main.cpp:16:35: error: static member function static int SampleClass::countSomeClass() cannot have cv-qualifier
static int countSomeClass() const

Answer 1

A static method cannot be marked as const: since it doesn't work on an instance, it makes no sense to specify that it cannot modify it.

(you could argue that for static methods it could have referred to static methods that cannot modify the static data associated with the class; however, this would have no use anyway, since you cannot have a const class or form a const pointer or reference to a class, as in C++ classes aren't objects)