Should you be able to initialize a float with a char?

[ab]

On Thursday, 19 May 2022 at 03:46:42 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/18/2022 5:55 PM, max haughton wrote:
>> People do indeed (I'd question whether it's routine in a good 
>> D program, I'd flag it in code review) manipulate characters 
>> as integers, but I think there's something to be said for 
>> forcing people to go char -> suitable integer -> char.
>
> Casts are a common source of bugs, not correctness. This is 
> because it is forced override of the type system. If the types 
> change due to refactoring, the cast may no longer be correct, 
> but the programmer will have no way of knowing.

This can be solved by a cast with explicit source and destination 
type, e.g.


auto cast_from(From,To,Real)(Real a)
{
	static if (is (From==Real))
		return cast(To) a;
	else
		pragma(msg, "Wrong types");
}

void main()
{
     import std.range, std.stdio;
	
	short a=1;
	int b=cast_from!(short,int)(a);

	bool c=1;
	// int d=cast_from!(short,int)(a);	// compile time error
	
     writeln("Test: ", b);
}