Should we cast away [casting]?

Question

I feel that the casting tag is not a very good tag for a few reasons:

It's too broad. Just a quick scan of the questions which use it show languages as varied as C++, Java, C#, SQL, Python, etc.
It has 0 followers, which indicates it's either not useful, or not interesting enough to follow.

I think casting should be burned.

Casting and converting are different things. When you (type-)cast, the object still remains the same, you just treat it as a different type. With that said, I also don't see any reason for this tag. — Simon Forsberg, Jan 21 '16 at 14:59

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:41:02Z

6

I'm not so sure. Neither of those two reasons is a solid justification for eliminating a tag.

Applicability to multiple languages is a poor criterion. By that logic, we should eliminate fizzbuzz.

file has 0 followers. playing-cards has just one follower. I consider both of them to be useful categories.

Furthermore, there are questions about code whose primary purpose is casting. For example: A less verbose const_cast

So, while we may want to re-evaluate how the tag is applied, I would hesitate to just blast it away.

Community♦

5

answered Jan 21 '16 at 17:33

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\$\begingroup\$ I think that according to my answer on other burninate-request casting would fit into the 1st category even though it may be a subtle one. \$\endgroup\$ – Bruno Costa Jan 23 '16 at 8:06

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