but, that's the beauty of "absolute", it's the ultimate typecast. It allows the programmer to typecast any variable to any desired type without any complaints from the compiler. Of course, that means the programmer should know what he/she is doing.
"absolute" is absolutely great
The thing is, I love hacking around with memory layout, e.g. I really like the
quake fast inverse square root algorithm, it's a real beauty. The thing is if you do anything special (like memory magic), your code should reflect this special treatment. In the fast inverse square root algorithm it does this via pointer casts:
So this explicetly states: give me the value of x if I consider the memory as an integer layout. And through the unusual (and cumbersome) syntax it also says on a meta level to any developer reading this: "I am doing something unusual here, and I probably thought about this otherwise why would I do the hassle".
Casts are beautiful, because they allow doing the naughty things, while signaling that what you are doing is special. You can go even further, e.g. C++ has (I think) 5 different cast types, depending if you are casting values (statically or dynamically), pointer or even bitcasts if you want a different type with correct bit representation. All of them doing different type checks so you can explicetly state what you want to do and what the compiler should check.
Personally I think this is a bit overboard (as I often see C++ developers just use the simple C cast which does anything), but at least some indication and checks should remain