I'll try again on this. My reading of the current documentation on casts leaves me with the impression that D now has only the equivalent of the C++ dynamic_cast.
This seems unreasonably restrictive given that C++ has traditional C- style cast, dynamic_cast, static_cast, and reinterpret_cast - or maybe it's changed now? If D is a system programming language should I not be able to tell the compiler that a given set of bits represents what I say it is, and suffer the consequences if I get things wrong? Steve