Question

Eric Lippert’s comments in this question have left me thoroughly confused. What is the difference between casting and conversion in C#?

Answer 1

I believe what Eric is trying to say is:

Casting is a term describing syntax (hence the Syntactic meaning).

Conversion is a term describing what actions are actually taken behind the scenes (and thus the Semantic meaning).

A cast-expression is used to convert
explicitly an expression to a given
type.

And

A cast-expression of the form (T)E,
where T is a type and E is a
unary-expression, performs an explicit
conversion (§13.2) of the value of E
to type T.

Seems to back that up by saying that a cast operator in the syntax performs an explicit conversion.