using a typedefed variable with library classes

[Charles Hixson]

Christopher Wright wrote:
> Charles Hixson wrote:
>> A) Yes, it works the way that you say.  This damages it's utility.
>> B) I'm replying to a question as to how typedef could reasonably be 
>> extended.
> 
> The point of a typedef is to provide additional type safety. This would 
> not exist if you could implicitly cast back and forth. Unless you want 
> an implicit cast from a typedef type to the base type, and not the 
> reverse -- that might be reasonable (I can't immediately see any issues 
> with it).

That's all that's needed to solve the use case that I presented. 
Unfortunately, what it tried to do was cast it to either byte or long 
rather than the base case (which was int).  Fortunately it couldn't 
decide which to cast it as, as either choice would have been an error. 
(I'm writing to a binary file, and the size of the item written is 
significant.)

Because of this, to avoid scattering casts throughout the program, I had 
to replace the typedef with alias.  This works, but it also definitely 
prevents the type safety that a typedef could (should) have provided.