C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

4.11.3. Explicit Conversions

Sometimes we want to explicitly force an object to be converted to a different type. For example, we might want to use floating-point division in the following code:

int i, j;double slope = i/j;

To do so, we’d need a way to explicitly convert i and/or j to double. We use a cast to request an explicit conversion.

Warning

Although necessary at times, casts are inherently dangerous constructs.

Named Casts

A named cast has the following form:

cast-name<type>(expression);

where type is the target type of the conversion, and expression is the value to be cast. If type is a reference, then the result is an lvalue. The ...