Explicit Type Conversion in Scala

Lets say I have the following code:

abstract class Animal
case class Dog(name:String) extends Animal
var foo:Animal = Dog("rover")
var bar:Dog = foo //ERROR!

How do I fix the last line of this code? Basically, I just want to do what, in a C-like language would be done:

var bar:Dog = (Dog) foo

I figured this out myself. There are two solutions:

1. Do the explicit cast:

   var bar:Dog = foo.asInstanceOf[Dog]

2. Use pattern matching to cast it for you, this also catches errors:

   var bar:Dog = foo match { case x:Dog => x case _ => { // Error handling code here } }