Tag Archives: const_cast

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Glennan Carnie

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd

Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.

Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)

• Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
• Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
• Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020

Type casting in C++ is a form of what is known in computer science as type punning – that is, circumventing the type system of a programming language.

C++ inherits its conversion and casting mechanism from C, but supplements it (although sensibly we should say, replaces it) with four, more explicit cast operations:

static_cast
reinterpret_cast
const_cast
dynamic_cast

In C and C++ – and particularly in embedded systems – casting is a necessary evil; so much so that many programmers just accept it […]