> It's hard to imagine that the feature would require 56 (!!) pages of specifications if the constness rule were omitted. Who the heck ordered that!!??

The better question you should ask is: who determined that number and put it in their paper with a straight face?

Yes, the section on wording in P2900 is physically 56 pages. That's not 56 pages of new wording though.

For those unaware: Wording is always presented as a diff to the working draft. Apart from new sections that have to be added for contracts, those 56 pages replicate existing pages of the draft verbatim as context for their changes, which often boil down to: adding a bullet point to a list (e.g. extending the list of keywords), adding a sentence to a pre-existing paragraph (e.g. extending the syntax for lambdas), etc.

You could probably condense the wording down quite a bit, it would be harder to follow what is going on with the changes, but apparently that's what some people who just count page numbers would prefer.