opCast'ing strings

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, November 13, 2017 12:40:39 bauss via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Monday, 13 November 2017 at 01:12:59 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > On Monday, 13 November 2017 at 01:03:17 UTC, helxi wrote:
> >> In this program, casting using to does not work as intended
> >> (returning 23/11) on the struct. However, calling opCast
> >> directly seems to do the job. Why is that?
> >
> > to!string calls a function called `string toString() {}` on the
> > struct, not the cast operator.
>
> Which is generally what you want to use anyway and not a cast
> overload.
>
> My rule of thumb (Which can of course differ per preference.) is
> that cast overload should only be done between the following:
>
> struct <-> scalar types
> class <-> scalar types
> struct <-> class
>
> Any string conversions should always be done with `toString()`.
>
> Anything else should not be implemented with casts or conversion
> methods. An exception of course is creating slices, which is
> acceptable using `opSlice`, but generally I avoid using something
> like `opCast` to an array, UNLESS it's an array wrapper, which
> you most likely won't have in D anyway, because you'd be better
> off creating a range.

There's nothing wrong with using opCast to define other conversions - it's
generally what std.conv.to is going to use (the other options being alias
this and a constructor if the type being converted to has a constructor that
would work). It's just that in the case of string, there's a standard
function for converting to it other than opCast. The main problem with
overloading opCast in general is that doing so unfortunately disables all of
the built-in casts, which can be a big problem - though hopefully that gets
fixed at some point.

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5747
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9249

There's also the argument that using an explicitly named function is clearer
- particularly if it's not obvious what converting from one type to another
would mean - but those won't work with std.conv.to. So, it depends on what
you're trying to do.

- Jonathan M Davis