- Casting back and forth does not preserve information. (This may be true for some other type pairs as well, but in this case it's true in almost every instance.)
Right, there are many other explicit casts that lose information. In fact, I think that's somewhat the point of an explicit cast -- if a cast didn't lose information, it could be done implicitly. By explicitly casting something, the user is acknowledging that they accept the possibility of lost information.
- It's an arbitary definition that is not obviously supported by mathematical or similar principles.
It has a long standing precedent outside of mathematics, such as in C and derived programming languages.
-Neil
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