RTTI
RTTI is short for runtime type information. It's one of the more recent additions to C++ and isn't supported by many older implementations. Other implementations may have compiler settings for turning RTTI on and off. The intent of RTTI is to provide a standard way for a program to determine the type of object during runtime. Many class libraries have already provided ways to do so for their own class objects, but in the absence of built-in support in C++, each vendor's mechanism typically is incompatible with those of other vendors. Creating a language standard for RTTI should allow future libraries to be compatible with each other.
What's It For?
Suppose you have a hierarchy of classes descended from a common base. You can set a base class ...
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