(I've ended up commenting on this issue on Stack Overflow quite a few times, so I figured it would be worth writing a blog post to refer to in the future.) There are lots of ways of converting values from one type to another – either changing the compile-time type but actually keeping the value the same, or actually changing the value (for example converting int to double). This post will not go into all of those - it would be enormous - just two of them, in one specific situation. The situation we're in[...]