As cast is a tool that might initially seem like an easy way to convert types. So, why has this functionality found its place in the advanced category? Well, with great power comes great responsibility. We could perform some casts that make sense, like from Bool to Int, but we could also perform casts that we refer to as absurd. An example of this might be converting Text to Int.

There might be times when we want to pass a variable that is a Bool to a function that accepts Int. Since Bool and Int are types that are compatible with each other, we can easily cast one into the other like so:

let isReady = systemIsReady()
processStatus(isReady as Int)

Amber allows us to cast one data type to any other data type. This should be avoided and only used if necessary.

let a = "12"
let b = a as Int

We can clearly see that this could lead to some big bugs. For example one could pass "abc" instead of "12" in a string which is not a valid value for Int type. To convert a string to an integer, it's better to use parse_int() function from the standard library.

import { parse_int } from "std/text"

let a = "12"
let b = parse_int(a) failed {
    echo "Variable `a` is not a number."
}

echo b + 12
// Outputs: 24