[TinkersW]

The author refers to casting ints to floats but seems to actually be talking about converting. Casting is when you change the type, but don't change the data..

I don't really think much of Zig myself for other reasons, but comptime seems like a good design.

[wyldfire]

> Casting is when you change the type, but don't change the data..

Is that the case? That's not what I think of when I think of C-style casts.

    float val = 12.4;
    int val_i = (int) val;

The representation in memory of `val` should not match that of `val_i`, right? The value is encoded differently and the quantity is not preserved through this transformation. I don't think that means that the data weren't changed.

Maybe you're thinking of aliasing/type-punning? Casts in C do perform conversions as they do in C++.

[spacechild1]

Casting and type conversion are synonyms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_conversion

[jjtheblunt]

The post didn't say "type conversion", just conversion, like the int with value 3 landing in memory after calling atoi("3").

[spacechild1]

The post gave the example of casting a float to an int. That is a (type) conversion.

The point is that certain casts/type conversions can change the underlying data.

> like the int with value 3 landing in memory after calling atoi("3").

That's something else entirely. People may colloquially call this "converting a string to an integer", but what we're realling doing here is parsing a string as an integer.