do you still strictly speaking have to use unsigned char to avoid undefined behavior in modern versions of C? Yes, from the C11 draft standard section 7.4 Character handling <ctype.h> paragraph 1 says (emphasis mine): The header declares several functions useful for classifying and mapping characters.198) In all cases the argument is an int, the … Read more
TryCast and DirectCast are casting operators that directly map to the CLR’s support for casting. They can quickly cast an object of a base type to a derived type or unbox a value of a value type. DirectCast throws an exception when the cast isn’t possible, TryCast returns Nothing if it failed. You typically want … Read more
The first thing to note is VB.NET does not have a direct analog to C#’s (type)instance casting mechanism. I bring this up because it’s useful as a starting point and common reference in comparing the two VB.NET operators (and they are operators, not functions, even though they have function semantics). DirectCast() is more strict than … Read more