title: Const vs protected static readonly
body: <p>I've got a wrapper class which encapsulates a piece of information that needs to be transmitted as a byte array.</p>
  
  <p>In that way, the class encapsulates the necessary header (with fields like DATA_LENGTH or MESSAGE_TYPE) into the corresponding byte positions. For that I want to define positions and length in constants, for example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>HEADER_DATA_LENGTH_IX = 0;
  HEADER_DATA_LENGTH_LENGTH = 2;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which means DATA_LENGTH starts at 0 and takes two bytes.</p>
  
  <p>but so far I'm struggling with making them constants or static readonly fields. Const cannot be protected, therefore I won't be able to derive a new class and change the constants if a use them, on the other way I might declare new constants in the derived class and the use them.</p>
  
  <p>What will be your approach?</p>