== Quote from Jarrett Billingsley (jarrett.billings...@gmail.com)'s article > On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Andrei > Alexandrescu<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote: > >> - opImplicitCast > > > > I think alias this should render that unnecesary. > 'alias this' might cover a lot of cases, but this is the pretty big > one that I can think of: consider a Bigint or the like. You might > want to use such a type transparently in place of any other integer > type, i.e. as an array index. Something like "a[bi.toSizet()]" looks > pretty awful. But 'alias this' couldn't work in this case, because > the underlying representation is *not* an integer. It's probably an > array or somesuch. opImplicitCast would allow you to transparently > use a Bigint in place of a normal int while still letting you > represent the data any way you want (and letting you check the > validity of the cast at runtime). Basically any type which represents > its data as something other than what you want to implicitly cast to > would have the same problem.
But you can alias this a function, not just a member. Example: import std.conv; struct Foo { string num; uint numToString() { return to!uint(num); } alias numToString this; }