No, you don't seem to be getting what I'm saying. I'm saying don't use !, and showing you how to avoid using it in a common pattern. Using 'if let' instead of ! does give you compile time verification of correctness.

! is there for the small number of cases where that's not possible. And it makes it much more obvious where you've got a potential problem, because the '!' is a literal code smell. You can't really do that with c++.