Nice way to cast a homogeneous tuple

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:47:52 -0700, Carl Banks wrote:

> On Jul 28, 7:32 am, Steven D'Aprano <st... at REMOVE-THIS-
> cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:35:52 -0400, wheres pythonmonks wrote:
>> > Thanks ... I thought int was a type-cast (like in C++) so I assumed I
>> > couldn't reference it.
>>
>> Python doesn't have type-casts in the sense of "tell the compiler to
>> treat object of type A as type B instead". The closest Python has to
>> that is that if you have an instance of class A, you can do this:
>>
>> a = A()  # make an instance of class A a.__class__ = B  # tell it that
>> it's now class B
>>
>> and hope that it won't explode when you try to use it :/
> 
> Type casts in C and non-pathlogical C++ don't modify the object they are
> casting.
> 
> int (and str, float, etc.) is the closest thing to a type cast in
> Python.


Perhaps I have been misinformed, but my understanding of C type-casts is 
that (where possible), a cast like `int(var)` merely tells the compiler 
to temporarily disregard the type of var and treat it as if it were an 
int. In other words, it's a compiler instruction rather than a conversion 
function.



-- 
Steven