automatic casting

[Paolo Bonzini]

> why not eliminate the requirement to cast, since the
> instanceof ensures that the object is of the right

You should ask Sun about this, not the GCC community; there are no GNU 
extensions to the Java language.  Anyway the answer is probably going to 
be that while this case is obvious, there are going to be more and more 
complicated cases that the compiler won't possibly figure out.

Paolo