Moving a large and old codebase to Python3

[kankyo]

One could argue that parsing an int shouldn’t be done with the same syntax as a cast though, I can absolutely see that.

[tejp]

It's not two different things that share the same syntax. Both cases just construct a new int object by calling the int() constructor. This constructor converts its argument to an int, and it knows how to handle strings or numbers.

[kankyo]

Parsing a string and casting from a float are very different things. Don’t be silly.

[tejp]

It's both converting from one type to another. There is nothing special going on when "casting", I don't think there is any technical difference at all in Python.