[Oberon] ANY type cast

[Thomas Frey]

>    I didn't found any documentation about ANY type, but it's easy to 
> understand it is another PTR. The only difference I've seen is that only 
> PACO compiler recognize it.
>    The question is: if it cast any POINTER and OBJECT why didn't cast 
> PONITER TO ARRAY OF CHAR? Or better, why only one direction?  If we have:
>    VAR data: ANY;  str: Utilities.String;
> the assignment
>    data := str;
> is ok for the compiler, but the condition:
>    data IS Utilities.String    , or the cast    data(Utilities.String)  
> , or   WITH data: Utilities.String DO
> are not.
>    How can I recuperate the value pointed by data, witch in this case is 
> a string?

ANY is an alias for PTR. It only works for OBJECT instances. A better 
keyword would be OBJECT but it is already taken by the OBJECT keyword 
for OBJECT-CLASS. To allow casting data(Utilities.String) the type guard 
code generated by the compiler would need to be changed.

--Thomas