Doubts about object Casting

Question

I am helping a friend from first year to prepare his exam on Java. The teacher asked them to create a method that can cast a Musicians to a Poets.

No one knew how to do it. After thinking a good while, I came to the conclusion that it is impossible to do that(ClassCastException), because the fact that Musician and Poet Share an Interface is not enough to cast them to the other.

I think that would be possible only, if they were in the same inheritance chain.

Now I have three questions:

1. Am I right?
2. If I am right, what is what the professor wanted from them to do? I really doubt that he would ask for such a thing.
3. If I am wrong, could you write code that can cast a Musician into a Poet?

Answer 1

1. You are right
2. Trick question?
3. No, at least, not without a ClassCastException.

You could try:

 Musician musician = new Musician();
 Artist artist = musician;
 Poet poet = (Poet)artist;

But of course, that code won't actually work at runtime.