Bill Venners: In your C++ Style and Technique FAQ, you say, "An ugly operation should have an ugly syntactic form." I thought that was an interesting approach to design. You want to discourage users from doing something, but you don't want it to be impossible for them to do it when they really need to, so you provide a way, but make it ugly.
Bjarne Stroustrup: Yes. That's the new cast syntax. Casts do provide an essential service. The new syntax is an improvement over the C-style casts because it allows the compiler to check for errors that it couldn't with the old syntax. But the new syntax was made deliberately ugly, because casting is still an ugly and often unsafe operation.
This page last modified on 6 April 2004.