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cast -- Definition The cast operation ``coerces'' a variable from one data type to another. There are two reasons to cast a variable. The first is to convert a variable's data into a form acceptable to a given function. For example, the function hypot takes two doubles. If the variables leg_x and leg_y are floats, the rules of C require that they be cast automatically to double. If the compiler did not do not do this, hypot would grab a double's worth of memory: the four bytes of your float, plus four bytes of whatever happens to be sitting on the stack. The leads to results that are less than totally accurate. The other reason to cast a variable is when you cast one type of pointer to another. For example, char *foo; int *bar; bar = (int *)foo; Although foo and bar are of the same length, you would cast foo in this instance to stop the C compiler from complaining about a type mismatch. See Also data formats, data types, Programming COHERENT