A comparison of the C++ casting operators

In addition to the C-style casting operator (provided for backwards compatibility) the C++ standard defines four additional casting operators:

• static_cast
• const_cast
• dynamic_cast
• reinterpret_cast

The purpose of these new casting operators is to provide better type checking. Their use is encouraged over the old C-style casting operator.

http://www.cppreference.com/wiki/keywords/casting_comparison