Trivial suggestion

[Ravi Pandya <ravi>]

Date: Wed, 12 Sep 90 03:52:21 PDT
   From: michael (Michael McClary)

   > This is no great priority, but it would eliminate a dozen or two
   > messages from the interface.

   But it does so by substituting run-time type-checking for compile-time
   type-checking.

Not exactly. In fact, CAST(Bar, OK(baz->fetchFoo())) could safely be
turned into a hard cast by some hypothetical optimizer if Bar is equal
to or a superclass of Foo (the return type of fetchFoo). If Bar is a
subclass of Foo, then the run-time type checking would be necessary
even if we had a getFoo method. Using OK(fetchFoo) instead of getFoo
merely avoids writing a zillion fetchX/getX pairs.
	--ravi