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Annotation of coherent/a/usr/man/ALL/cast, revision 1.1.1.1

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                      3: cast                        Definition                       cast
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                      8: The cast  operation ``coerces'' a variable from  one data type to
                      9: another.
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                     11: There are two  reasons to cast a variable.  The  first is to con-
                     12: vert a  variable's data into  a form acceptable to  a given func-
                     13: tion.  For example, the function hhyyppoott takes two ddoouubbllees.  If the
                     14: variables lleegg_xx and lleegg_yy are ffllooaatts, the rules of C require that
                     15: they be cast automatically to ddoouubbllee.  If the compiler did not do
                     16: not do  this, hhyyppoott  would grab a  ddoouubbllee's worth of  memory: the
                     17: four bytes of your ffllooaatt,  plus four bytes of whatever happens to
                     18: be sitting on the stack.  The leads to results that are less than
                     19: totally accurate.
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                     21: The other reason to cast a  variable is when you cast one type of
                     22: pointer to another.  For example,
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                     25:         char *foo;
                     26:         int *bar;
                     27:         bar = (int *)foo;
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                     30: Although ffoooo and  bbaarr are of the same length,  you would cast foo
                     31: in this instance to stop  the C compiler from complaining about a
                     32: type mismatch.
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                     34: ***** See Also *****
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                     36: data formats, data types, definitions
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                     64: COHERENT Lexicon                                           Page 1
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