Okay, so I was messing around with this thing called “casting” in programming, and let me tell you, it got a bit hairy. I’m trying to get better at clearly documenting what I’m doing, so here it is, the good, the bad, and the ugly of my “cast of the remaining” experiment.
The Setup
I started with a simple idea. I grabbed a bunch of numbers – some integers, some decimals (floats, as they call them). My goal was to mix them up, change their types, and see what happened. I mean, who doesn’t want to turn a number into another number?
The Action
- First, I took an integer, something like 10, and I tried to cast it into a float. Easy peasy. It just became 10.0. No drama there.
- Then, things started to get wild. I took a float, say 3.14 (Pi, my friend!), and tried casting it to an integer. Boom! The decimal part just got chopped off. I was left with 3. Important lesson: casting from float to integer can lose information.
- Next, I went crazy. I made a char, like the letter “A”. and tried to see its integer form. It showed a number! I later checked that “A” has a numerical representation (ASCII, they call it).
- I got a bigger interger like 128, I cast it to char, it become another symbol.
The Conclusion
Casting can be super useful, but you gotta be careful. You can lose information, especially when going from floats to *, it’s pretty cool that letters actually have number equivalents. It’s like a secret code! I’m definitely going to keep playing with this, but now I have a better idea of what to watch out for. Next time, I plan to explore the ‘remaining’ as the title.