In reply to supal:
Your understanding is correct. It’s a complex trade off between enumerating all the possible scenarios and excluding something by mistake versus creating general rules that leaves it up to your own judgement. System tasks have to work this way in order to implement routines like $display, $signed, etc.
In reply to sbellock:
This does need clarification. The intent is that the expression inside the cast is not under the context of anything outside the static cast—t’s only under the context of the static casting type.