title: For Scala are there any advantages to type erasure?
body: <p>I've been hearing a lot about different JVM languages, still in vaporware mode, that propose to implement reification somehow. I have this nagging half-remembered (or wholly imagined, don't know which) thought that somewhere I read that Scala somehow took advantage of the JVM's type erasure to do things that it wouldn't be able to do with reification. Which doesn't really make sense to me since Scala is implemented on the CLR as well as on the JVM, so if reification caused some kind of limitation it would show up in the CLR implementation (unless Scala on the CLR is just ignoring reification).</p>
  
  <p>So, is there a good side to type erasure for Scala, or is reification an unmitigated good thing? </p>