Switch to go's casting syntax

[brson]

Go does:

x.(type)

People like it. It would make our casting precedence much clearer since it would be the same as field/method access (our as precedence has changed twice in the last year).

[Dretch]

I am a person and I quite like the appearance of the existing syntax, though I concede it suffers from precedence issues just like other infix operators.

[catamorphism]

I don't like it. The semantics of field access don't have much to do with the semantics of casting, and the syntax makes it look like they do. Nothing wrong with as as far as I'm concerned (I always write copious numbers of parentheses when I'm not sure about precedence in my code anyway).

[graydon]

Yeah, I was on the "less keywords is better" campaign the other day but I've done some doodling with code that uses 'as' and it seems to read almost strictly worse with .(type). Not sure why. Visually cluttered or something.

I agree the precedence issue on as is a bit of a problem. Or rather, the fact that as introduces a clear switch-in from the expression grammar to the type grammar, but the switch out only comes when we "finish" reading a type. For types with suffixes, this makes for an unfortunate interface point between the two grammars. Having some kind of terminator for a cast's type sub-expression would be better. I'd almost prefer as::<T>(foo) or something.

(I guess april is syntax month, eh?)

[brson]

I'm convinced that as reads nicer. There don't seem to be any firm proponents of this syntax. Closing.