casting and arrays..

[Frits van Bommel]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
> Incidentally, I never knew that you could safely cast arrays of one type
> to another!  Yet another thing I didn't know about D :P

I never saw anyone claim it was _safe_, just that it was _possible_ ;)...

Casting arrays is about as safe as pointer casting (which is actually 
pretty much what you're doing), which is to say it isn't safe unless 
you're very careful ;).
For example, if the type you're casting to an array of contains any 
pointers or class references, you've usually got a problem unless you're 
sure those are valid (reading pointers from anything that wasn't always 
in memory is a bad idea, for example; so no reading pointers from file 
or socket connections).
The only thing that's safer about array casting is that the length of 
the data is taken into account, so you won't as easily be accessing 
invalid memory. Which I'd say is more of a property of arrays vs 
pointers, instead of array casting vs pointer casting.