Add safer types of casts

The only form of cast expression we have is intended to completely bypass the type system. This is like most forms of casting in C (not counting conversions) -- it never fails either at runtime or at compile time.

Maybe we can add two new types of casts:

Downcast

downcast(T, E) checks at compile time that the type of expression E is a supertype of T, and checks at runtime that E is in fact an instance of T. As a special case, if the type of E is Any, the compile time check always succeeds, but the runtime check is still performed.

A possible implementation:

def downcast(type, expr):
    assert isinstance(expr, type)
    return expr

It's intentional that this uses assert (though debatable): the intended use case is currently handled by inserting the same assert manually. IOW:

x = downcast(type, expr)

is roughly equivalent to:

assert isinstance(expr, type)
x = expr

Upcast

Probably much less needed, but proposed for symmetry and because occasionally it's useful. upcast(T, E) should check at compile time that T is a supertype of the type of E, and at runtime it's a no-op.

A possible implementation:

def upcast(type, expr):
    return expr

This fragment:

x = upcast(type, expr)

is roughly equivalent to:

x: type = expr

except that it works even if the type of x has already been declared.

Beginne mit der Überprüfung der im Issue-Text vorgeschlagenen Downcast- und Upcast-Semantik. Es werden keine Dateien, Tests oder Einstiegspunkte genannt; der erste Schritt besteht darin, ein abgestimmtes Design festzulegen, wonach Implementierung und Tests erforderlich wären.