Explicit Type Conversion in Scala

Question

Lets say I have the following code:

abstract class Animal case class Dog(name:String) extends Animal var foo:Animal = Dog("rover") var bar:Dog = foo //ERROR! 

How do I fix the last line of this code? Basically, I just want to do what, in a C-like language would be done:

var bar:Dog = (Dog) foo 

Answer 1

I figured this out myself. There are two solutions:

1) Do the explicit cast:

var bar:Dog = foo.asInstanceOf[Dog] 

2) Use pattern matching to cast it for you, this also catches errors:

var bar:Dog = foo match {   case x:Dog => x   case _ => {     // Error handling code here   } }