Personally I like the explicit names, even if I can appreciate the argument that the proposed mechanism makes the templating system more generic.
The idea makes a lot of sense. Casting shouldn't be necessary at any time as this means you leave the safe space a static type-system gives you. At the point when you cast all bets are off; it's only on you to prevent type errors, the compiler can't help any more (ant this property of casts is frankly "viral", so it can affect code far away).
The problem with C++ is of course that they have a gazilion of ways to do (sometimes in surprising ways almost) exactly the same.
In Scala for example casts are also very explicit. You need to call the `.asInstanceOf[TargetType]` method. But that's the only syntax for this.
It makes really a big difference to have only one obvious way to do something. (Frankly Scala also doesn't always shine everywhere in this regard).
You should know what's the interface that you're sending/receiving, but if you're planning on making downcasts then either you're doing something very exotic or you should take a step back and reevaluate what you're doing.
I'm seeing a lot of people in this thread complaining about features being added to C++ that improve developer experience, but barely anyone complaining that shooting yourself in the foot requires making intentional choices to get your feet in front of your guns.
I'm not saying this is the right way of doing things (I don't think so), but many people expect this to be possible to do easily -- and it isn't. For them this is normal and not "something very exotic". I guess this is the source of the misunderstanding and the complaints.
And that's perfectly fine, provided that students learn that trying to do downcasts like casting an animal instance to a dog instance is something that in general never made any sense, and more often than not reflects ignorance.
> This way of doing things necessitates downcasting;
Not true. That way of doing things necessitates ignorance of basic concepts across many domains, including basic OO programming in general and C++ in particular. You can't blame the tool of your choice for problems you create out of ignorance and failing to think things through.