First of all: I recognise that typealias is just name for the same type and real casting would not be the case there, but I think following behaviour would be pretty handy :
Feature proposal
Ability to force type alias cast when assigning to aliased/compatible type. Probably adding new keyword would be good idea.
Example
Here is an example of what I’m thinking about:
forced typealias UserId = UUID
// .... //
val userId: UserId = ...
val someOtherId = userId // <- compile error here
And if we really know what we are doing:
val someOtherId = userId as UUID
Real use case
I have two related entities, lets name them Parent and Child.
Parent is identified by Long id value and so is child of parent so I have method to retrieve them with signature:
fun findChildren(parentId: ParentId, childId: ChildId)
where ParentId and ChildId are aliases of Long.
It is pretty easy to make there mistake in order of arguments and pass parentId as childId and vice versa.
I now I can wrap both ids in some value class or other pattern, but language support would make this problem just disappear.
