Function-style cast vs. constructor

Question

I learned that in C++,

typedef foo* mytype;

(mytype) a        // C-style cast

and

mytype(a)         // function-style cast
         


        

Answer 1

Syntactically, it is always a cast. That cast may happen to call a constructor:

char s [] = "Hello";
// Function-style cast; internally calls std::basic_string::basic_string(char const*, Allocator)
std::string s2 = std::string(s);
// C-style cast; internally calls std::basic_string::basic_string(char const*, Allocator)
std::string s3 = (std::string) s;