static consts in C carry their identity through their (fixed, unchanging) pointer address. Lets say you have a business rules engine, that's only meant to ingest threshold values from a certain module. You want to know if the 3.0 you're using is coming from the correct place in the code, or if there's a programming error. With a define, there's not enough additional information to be able to. With a static const, you can just have a const static array of pointers to the valid threshold constants, and use that in your tests for the rules engine.

I work in a highly regulated field, so often this level of paranoia and proof helps us make our case that our product works exactly the way we say it works.

Perhaps a distinction between static analysis (at compile) and dynamic analysis (at run time) is useful ?