That “instanceof” change looks strictly worse than Kotlin’s “smart casts” (after checking x is an instance of Y, x implicitly casts to Y as long as its value do

That “instanceof” change looks strictly worse than Kotlin’s “smart casts” (after checking x is an instance of Y, x implicitly casts to Y as long as its value doesn’t change). The new Java shorthand, by introducing a new variable name, also introduces some sneaky variable shadowing risks (as this blog post itself explains!) Edit to add: maybe the difficulty is in formally specifying “smart casts”, or at least clearly documenting them? I don’t think Jetbrains has documented all the rules used by Kotlin. It doesn’t seem undoable, though.