[Oberon] ANY type cast

[Dan Parnete]

Thomas Frey wrote:

>>    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
>
If ANY works only for OBJECT instance, it should not accept the 
assignment data := str, isn't it?

Dan