Casting an object to a reference?

Question

I've been reading some OSS code lately and stumbled upon this peculiar piece:

class Foo { ..... };
void bar() {
    Foo x;
   Foo *y=new Foo();
   x=(const Foo &) *y;
}

For the life of me I can't find documentation about the behavior of casting an object to a const reference.

Answer 1

x=(const Foo &) *y; is assignment. The only reason I see to explicitly cast to const reference is to have Foo::operator=(const Foo &) called for assignment if Foo::operator=(Foo &) also exists.

Answer 2

x=(const Foo &) y; line invokes undefined behavior.
Prefer to avoid C-style casts; they are easy to get wrong. You silence the compiler, so they are too dangerous.

Edit: this answer was relevant at the time, when in the question y was not dereferenced prior to the cast to const Foo &. For the answer to the question after *y edit, please see the answer given by n0rd