Relaxed assignment conversions for sealed types

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On 31/10/2020 23:30, Brian Goetz wrote:
>
>
>> On Oct 25, 2020, at 10:06 AM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com 
>> <mailto:brian.goetz at oracle.com>> wrote:
>>
>> To make it clear that I'm not talking about the annoyance of typing 
>> the cast, let's pretend I'm suggesting to write it like this:
>>
>>     BarImpl bi = (__static BarImpl) b;
>
> Pulling on this string some more — I think there’s a connection 
> between this feature and total statement switches.  We’ve been looking 
> for a way to make statement switches total, and here, what we’re 
> looking for is a way to make _casts_ total.  Which suggests this is 
> one feature, not two.  So perhaps:
>
>     switch-total (x) { … }  // a switch, but with added bonus totality 
> checking
>
>     BarImpl b = (total BarImpl) bar  // a cast, but with added bonus 
> totality checking

I agree the latter is a common enough problem when writing 
implementation code where you have a sealed hierarchy and you know 
there's only one impl (Foreign API has this all over the place).

To throw in the mix - how is some kind of pattern match assignment (we 
referred to as a "let expression" in some of the earlier docs [1]) would 
change the picture here? In other words, maybe it's overloading `=` 
which is at odds here, and we need to make it more explicit that this is 
more akin to an extraction/match?

Maurizio

[1] - https://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/amber/pattern-semantics.html

>
> Obviously we can use another word besides `total`, but it’s a pretty 
> good straw man.
>
>