October 1997
Intermediate to advanced
800 pages
20h 48m
English
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Chapter 12. Run-Time Type Identification
The previous chapter demonstrates the power of polymorphic programming with public inheritance. These concepts directly apply to class libraries, where base classes provide behaviors that derived classes may specialize or reuse. Class library hierarchies are extendable and easy to modify because type checking is an integral part of the virtual function mechanism. Dynamic binding plays a key role in polymorphic programming because it frees the programmer from the burden of type checking objects at run time.
Polymorphism with dynamic binding is not perfect, however. Occasionally, we need to check an object's type at run time to control its behavior properly. The techniques to identify run-time object types ...