Questions about placement of qualifiers in member functions

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at wasabisystems dot com>]

I have two questions about the placement of qualifiers in member
functions in C++.

I thought this was a logical thing to write:

class C { public: int (*f())() const; };
int foo(const C c) { return (*c.f())(); }

However, when I compile it, I get this:

/home/ian/foo4.cc: In function `int foo(C)':
/home/ian/foo4.cc:2: error: passing `const C' as `this' argument of `int (* C::f())()' discards qualifiers

This seems strange to me, because it seems like the `const' on the
first line is just being ignored.

I found out that I could write the declaration like this:

class C { public: int (*f() const)(); };
int foo(const C c) { return (*c.f())(); }

and it would compile without error.

So my questions are:

1) Is it correct that a member function qualifier should be written
   within the declaration when the member function returns a pointer
   to a function?  Why not write the qualifer after the list of
   parameters, as is normally done?

2) If the answer to question 1 is that this is correct, then why
   doesn't g++ warn about the `const' when compiling C::f in the first
   function above?  That `const' appears to mean nothing, which to me
   means that its appearance ought to be a syntax error.  If not, then
   what does it mean?

I can file a PR about this, but I thought I would first check to see
whether there is some aspect to this that I do not understand.

Ian