Okay, so const was available as a feature - but not used because it wasn't the default? Some of the discussion on this seems to be saying Solidity supports exceptions and transactions, which should provide a lot of safety here (on error, an exception should be thrown and everything the script just did should be rewound) but the documentation was still exhorting programmers to check return values all over the place. Is this at least in part a matter of bad defaults? I'd be quite prepared to believe so; bad defaults are a much bigger problem than they are sometimes thought to be.
