feat(cast): remove redundant `cast` commands

[Sabnock01]

Component

Cast

Describe the feature you would like

Currently, to-dec and to-hex act as specialized versions of to-base making them both redundant.

These should probably be deprecated to remove clutter and simplify the tool and leave to-base as a catch-all for converting from one radix to another.

Additional context

I can think of other such simplifications that can be made to some of these conversion commands, but I'll stick with just this one for now and add others in the event we decide to move forward with this.

[mds1]

I do agree with you that cast has a good amount of clutter in the commands and could benefit from a refactor.

Before deprecating the mentioned commands, I think it'd be ideal to instead survey all cast commands think about how they should be cleaned up and deduped more broadly. For example, it is convenient to have an alias since converting between decimal and hex is common, so a better approach might be to have subcommands. For example:

# Top level command that doesn't actually do anything
cast convert 

# Subcommands to convert to the respective types
cast convert to-dec
cast convert to-hex
cast convert to-base 2 # convert to binary

# And they each take a flag to specify padding
cast convert to-dec --pad 32 # pad to 32 bytes, e.g. uint256
cast convert to-hex --pad 32 # pad to 32 bytes, e.g. bytes32

# Maybe we have aliases for common pad amounts
cast convert to-uint256 # equivalent to `cast convert to-dec --pad 32
cast convert to-address # equivalent to `cast convert to-hex --pad 20

There's a bunch of other existing related conversion commands that might fit in here, e.g. to-int256, etc.

And I'm saying the above proposal is optimal just yet, so open to other ideas

[Evalir]

Yep I agree we could probably refactor cast a bit—we have to be careful about breaking changes around this though

[Sabnock01]

We can rework this to be a meta issue on cast refactoring if you guys would like.

[mds1]

Supportive of making this a meta issue, and agreed around being careful about breaking changes

[mds1]

Sharing a potential starting point for a refactor, largely courtesy of Claude. Very likely some commands are missing, and cast convert still needs fleshing out as mentioned above

cast <COMMAND>

Commands:
  ens
    resolve-name     Perform an ENS lookup
    lookup-address   Perform an ENS reverse lookup
    namehash         Calculate the ENS namehash of a name

  tx
    build            Build a transaction (formerly mktx)
    send             Sign and publish a transaction
    receipt          Get the transaction receipt for a transaction
    get              Get information about a transaction (formerly tx)
    decode           Decode a raw signed EIP 2718 typed transaction (formerly decode-transaction)

  block
    get              Get information about a block (formerly block)
    number           Get the latest block number (formerly block-number)
    basefee          Get the basefee of a block (formerly base-fee)
    timestamp        Get the timestamp of a block
    find             Get the block number closest to the provided timestamp (formerly find-block)

  account
    balance          Get the balance of an account in wei
    nonce            Get the nonce for an account
    code             Get the runtime bytecode of a contract
    storage          Get the raw value of a contract's storage slot
    proof            Generate a storage proof for a given storage slot
    compute-address  Compute the contract address from a given nonce and deployer address
    implementation   Fetch the EIP-1967 implementation account
    admin            Fetch the EIP-1967 admin account

  abi
    encode           ABI encode the given function arguments (formerly abi-encode)
    decode           Decode ABI-encoded input or output data (formerly abi-decode)
    calldata         ABI-encode a function with arguments
    calldata-decode  Decode ABI-encoded input data (formerly calldata-decode)
    event            Get the event signature for a given topic 0 (formerly 4byte-event)
    signature        Get the function signatures for the given selector (formerly 4byte)

  convert (migrates original commands, suggestions for new ones in https://github.com/foundry-rs/foundry/issues/5467#issuecomment-1652068862)
    to-wei           Convert an ETH amount to wei
    from-wei         Convert wei into an ETH amount
    to-hex           Convert a number to hexadecimal
    from-hex         Convert a hexadecimal number to decimal
    to-uint256       Convert a number to a hex-encoded uint256
    to-int256        Convert a number to a hex-encoded int256
    from-utf8        Convert UTF8 text to hex (formerly from-utf8)
    to-ascii         Convert hex data to an ASCII string
    to-rlp           RLP encode hex data or an array of hex data
    from-rlp         Decode RLP encoded data
    concat-hex       Concatenate hex strings
    to-checksum      Convert an address to a checksummed format (EIP-55) (formerly to-checksum-address)
    to-fixed-point   Convert an integer into a fixed point number
    from-fixed-point Convert a fixed point number into an integer

  util
    keccak           Hash arbitrary data using Keccak-256
    selectors        Extract function selectors and arguments from bytecode
    disassemble      Disassemble hex encoded bytecode into human readable opcodes
    selector         Get the selector for a function (formerly sig)
    index            Compute the storage slot for an entry in a mapping

  generate
    interface        Generate a Solidity interface from a given ABI
    event-signature  Generate event signatures from event string (formerly sig-event)
    fig-spec         Generate Fig autocompletion spec
    shell-completion Generate shell completions script

  rpc
    send             Perform a raw JSON-RPC request (formerly rpc)
    client-version   Get the current client version
    chain-id         Get the Ethereum chain ID
    gas-price        Get the current gas price
    logs             Get logs by signature or topic
    call             Perform a call on an account without publishing a transaction
    estimate         Estimate the gas cost of a transaction
    access-list      Create an access list for a transaction

[DaniPopes]

cc https://github.com/foundry-rs/foundry/issues/7611