What is "cast"

In computer science, type conversion or coercion (from the term type convertion, typecasting, and coercion) are different forms of, implicitly or explicitly, changing an entity from one data type to another. This is done to take advantage of certain features of hierarchies of types or representations of types. An example would be small integers, which can be stored in a compact format and converted and a larger representation when used in arithmetic calculations. In object-oriented programming, type conversion allows programs to manipulate objects of a type as one of their predecessor types to simplify interaction with them.