Variably sized elements on the stack

auto: Because I like the fact that C++ is statically typed. It is arguable whether this is the case everywhere, but in general I would like the compiler to throw errors at me if some interface changes and is not usable anymore as it was before. Think of the overflow errors we had in the VM implementation: With auto it would have been much harder to find them.

For const: This is also a habit but I like to use const so that I can be sure that some function I call does not modify my local variable I passed to it (this is also something that can happen by a non-local change).