The compiler picks the most specific type it can, and at runtime it shows that the method lied about it's return type.

My line of reasoning went that since the method was returning

Any

the compiler should use this information, but of course the compiler first processes the

if

node and tries to be as strongly typed as possible

I mean, I can imagine its current behavior making code less verbose, or that it tries to be as strongly typed as possible, it just surprised me 🙂

..the original code was written a few months ago and I forgot about the exact parser syntax, then today I did the mistake of applying a simple micro optimization 😛

thanks again!