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by wahern 397 days ago
It's a consequence of the peculiarity of C type semantics, which disallows implicit conversions of pointer-to-pointer to pointer-to-pointer-to-const. C23 6.5.16.1 EXAMPLE 3 explains why:

  const char **cpp; char *p;
  const char c = ’A’;
  cpp = &p;   // constraint violation
  *cpp = &c;  // valid
  *p = 0;     // valid

  The first assignment is unsafe because it would allow the 
  following valid code to attempt to change the value of the 
  const object c.
There are proposals on the table for C2y to redefine various APIs, including strtol, strchr, memcpy, etc, to preserve const correctness. Implementations might make use of _Generic (there are some issues there, though), newly specified language features, or possibly use internal extensions not available in the language proper, to accomplish this.