Question

I have defined a class A, the actual properties are irrelevant. Is it possible to define a specialization of the static_cast<class T>(int) operator to convert from integers to class A?

So far I have been doing this by defining a convert function, such as A convert(int). But I would rather use static_cast for consistency with other conversions.

Is it possible?
I also want to avoid implicit conversions, which is why I’m not doing this through A‘s constructor.

Answer 1

static_cast is a language keyword and you can’t do anything to change that. However you can achieve what you what with an explicit converting constructor:

class Foo
{
public:
    explicit Foo(int bar) { }  // Can't be called implicitly, CAN be invoked with `static_cast`.
};

This works because the language defines static_cast‘s behavior in terms of object construction, invoking conversions as appropriate.