I agree, when discussing type casts. Value casts, as I am focused on, is a rather different story. The field is sort of mudded up in pike, as the workings of the type system isn't all that obvious to the naked eye.
If we instead discuss it in terms of data representation conversion, or data type conversion, rather than type casting, we significantly disambiguate and unmuddle things. In Pike, data type conversion is typically handled completely by whatever type of object is being converted to, with no help from the object being converted from. This is done in create(), and to convert an array of integers treated as time_t seconds-since-the-Epoch, into Calendar.Second objects, for instance, we can't employ any help from the pike's cast LFUNs -- (array(Calendar.Second))integers -- but have to resort to map( integers, Calendar.Second ), or the (very brittle) automap syntax Calendar.Second( integers[*] ), which I personally avoid even in those very basic cases where it actually works (like this). I do data type conversion a lot, especially near database operations persisting or reading back objects from storage. Having largely been away from pike hackery for a while, found the lack of language support for it, if not surprising (I'm not new to pike), then at least not a pleasant feature hole to rediscover. I do consider pike's array value casting a very elegant and readable higher order operation. It's just painfully limited in scope. A lot like automap, actually. :-)
