Q:

What are the benefits of explicit type cast in C++?

What are the benefits of explicit type cast in C++ ?

A:

They're more specific than the full general C-style casts.  You don't give up quite as much type safety and the compiler can still double check some aspects of them for you.
They're easy to grep for if you want to try clean up your code.
The syntax intentionally mimics a templated function call.  As a a result, you can "extend" the language by defining your own casts (e.g., Boost's lexical_cast).

