Safer casts

[Frits van Bommel]

Janice Caron wrote:
> 2008/5/13 Yigal Chripun <yigal100 at gmail.com>:
>>  D needs to make it possible
>>  to overload built-in properties.
> 
> You can't overload something that isn't a class. Overloading requires
> inheritance.

Overloading works fine without a class:
---
import std.stdio;

void foo(int i) {
     writefln("int %s", i);
}

void foo(char c) {
     writefln("char %s", c);
}

void main() {
     foo(42);
     foo('A');
}
---

You're probably thinking of overriding, which requires a virtual method 
in a base class.