more band aid coming - Object methods on 'any' tvars

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

Hi,
in order to further facilitate experiments with the current prototype, 
I've put together a compiler/specializer patch that adds some restricted 
support for calling 'harmless' Object methods on 'any' type-variables. 
Methods currently supported are:

* toString
* hashCode
* equals

The remaining Object methods are unsupported (most of them are related 
to locking ); the only two 'interesting' methods left out are:

* clone
* getClass

While it wouldn't be impossible to support them in the future, they are 
not as straightforward to get to (esp. getClass) - and we decided to 
leave them out for now.

One caveat about using Object methods on 'any' type-variables is that 
the signature of 'equals' is stricter; that is, you can imagine that an 
'any' type-variable T defines a method

equals(T)

and not

equals(Object)

That is: the compared values must have the same static type or the 
compiler will bark.

I hope you will find this useful.

Happy hacking!

Maurizio