unfortunately I hate how the current actors are deliberately type-unsafe. Has burnt me a few times ... the reason is that they were "borrowed" from erlang, as much as possible - the idea being that pattens could be added to the match on an actor (after it is created), so any unmatched "messages" in the "mailbox" will just sit there in hope that one day a pattern will fit - which I can't imagine is a common thing to want to do in reality.