Has anyone thought about changing the language to allow overloading of the
cast operators?  The new tr1::shared_ptr class defines three pseudo-cast
operators, static_pointer_cast, const_pointer_cast, and
dynamic_pointer_cast, it would be much easier to write generic code if these
were spelled static_cast, const_cast and dynamic_cast. Also, it's always a
hassle to try to convert an iterator to a const_iterator.  A const_cast
would make this much easier.  This would be useful if you wanted to write
two versions of a function, one that takes a const reference as a parameter
and returns a const_iterator, and one that takes a non-const reference as a
parameter and returns an iterator.

    vector<int>::const_iterator get_iterator(const vector<int> &vec);
    vector<int>::iterator get_iterator(vector<int> &vec)
    {
        const vector<int> &const_vec = vec;
        return const_cast<vector<int>::iterator>(get_iterator(const_vec));
    }

Joe Gottman

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