Casts

Explicit type casting is discouraged as much as possible, but is sometimes necessary, especially in the current preliminary version of C*. Casts are written with the "cast" keyword followed by the type in square brackets:

int x := cast[int](1.0);

C-style casts are removed from C*, primarily because they are difficult to parse. In future versions, with the addition of features like typecases and virtualization, it should be easy to avoid most or all explicit casts.

C++-style constructor casts are allowed in C*:

int x := int(1.0);

User-defined Casts

Users can define implicit casts between primitive types. Currently, this is primarly useful to "configure" C* to act like unsafe C/C++, for programmers who prefer brevity to readability. For example, the following definition lets boolean values be treated as integers:

operator int(bool b) {
	return if (b) 1 else 0;
}

The general form is to define an operator whose name is the target type of the cast, and whose parameter is the type being cast. A return type is not needed.