A question of type assertion

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

Hi,

As I progress with Ravi I often wish there was a way to perform type
assertion or coercion in the language. For example:

local t = { 1 }
local i: integer = t[1]

Above fails in Ravi as the compiler cannot know that the value
returned from t[1] is an integer.

It would be nice to be able to say:

local i: integer = t[1] as integer

Or some such like.

Language support is essential for performance reasons; Ravi already
supports type coercion of function return values. So following already
works.

function asinteger(a) return a end
local i: integer = asinteger(t[1])

Problem is this is bad for performance.

Now here is a hypothetical question - if Lua had been statically typed
language - what would the ideal expression be for this kind of type
coercion?

Regards
Dibyendu