title: In Julia, how do you recast variable type at a given memory location?
body: <p>I'm using FortranFiles.jl to interface with files written by an old Fortran code.  At one part of a given file, string arrays are cast as a single array of Float64's (or Float32's, depending) and stored as a Fortran record.</p>
  
  <p>I can't seem to find documentation on how to do this in the manual or on-line.</p>
  
  <p>Thus, to read the information, I'm using something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>fid = FortranFile("myfile.dat")
  read(fid, (Float64, 10))  # which actually represents 5x 16-char strings
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How does one go about recasting the memory from an array of Floats, a constraint given due to using FortranFiles.jl and the way the file is stored, to a contiguous section of memory known to be characters by Julia?</p>
  
  <p>Think of something similar to turning a <code>(void *)</code> in C to <code>(double *)</code>, etc...</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit</strong> - Fixed inaccurate comment above about how many 16-char long strings were being read in.</p>