How does the ERC20 tutorial instantiate an unimplemented interface?

Question

I've been going through the official Ethereum token tutorial and I noticed that the provided token code includes the following lines within the approveAndCall function:

tokenRecipient spender = tokenRecipient(_spender);
if (approve(_spender, _value)) {
    spender.receiveApproval(msg.sender, _value, this, _extraData);
    return true;
}

I'm confused how this works and what it does. Given that tokenRecipient is an interface [0] without a corresponding implementation, how can and why does approveAndCall call tokenRecipient's constructor and its receiveApproval method? While I can imagine that unimplemented interfaces like tokenRecipient might have default constructors and no-op implementations, I still don't see why approveAndCall would then call receiveApproval on the returned tokenRecipient contract.

At first, I was thinking that Solidity had copied Go and allowed implicit interface implementation i.e. if a contract and interface have matching methods and signatures, the contract implements that interface. But even that doesn't explain this case because the token contracts in this tutorial don't include receiveApproval implementations and therefore aren't implicitly implementing the tokenRecipient interface.

The only other option I can think of is that we're assuming that there's a tokenRecipient implementation that corresponds to the address passed in to approveAndCall as _spender. Is that what's happening? If so, I wish the tutorial made that more clear.

[0] tokenRecipient has the following signature.

interface tokenRecipient { 
    function receiveApproval(
        address _from, uint256 _value, address _token, bytes _extraData
    ) public; 
}

Answer 1

The only other option I can think of is that we're assuming that there's a tokenRecipient implementation that corresponds to the address passed in to approveAndCall as _spender

You got it right. tokenRecipient(_spender) is sort of like casting _spender to a tokenRecipient.