as
The as operator is used to coerce or cast values
or variables to certain class types. The operand to the right of the
as operator has to be a class identifier, such as
boolean, integer,
list, real,
record, string, or some other
object type. The expression will fail if the value in the first
operand cannot be coerced to the class identified in the second
operand (in fact you will find these statements raising a lot of
errors as you experiment with coercing values from type to type). See
Chapter 3for a discussion of
which types can be coerced to different classes.