title: What exactly is or was the purpose of C++ function-style casts?
body: <p>I am talking about "type(value)"-style casts. The books I have read pass over them quickly, saying only that they are semantically equivalent to C-style casts, "(type) value", and that they should be avoided. If they mean the same thing an old-style cast does, why were they ever added to the language? Also, because declarations can contain superfluous parentheses, this code: "T x(T(y));" doesn't do what someone intending to use the function-style casts would expect; it declares a function named x accepting a T and returning a T rather than constructing a T variable named x by casting y to a T.</p>
  
  <p>Were they a mistake in the design of the language?</p>