Doug Gregor wrote:
We can't overload dynamic_cast, which is too bad: that's the right name for this sort of thing. If only someone would go ahead and write the C++0x proposal to add overloading of the cast operators, smart pointers, any, variant, python::object, and many other classes would get much more intuitive syntax. But I digress...
FWIW, I'm told that the deadline for new language proposals is past, otherwise I'd seriously consider writing up a proposal to add "raw" strings to C++ to make experimenting with regex easier. But *I* digress...
In an ideal world, I think we'd end up using "dynamic_cast" for everything. Instead, we use the name "get", and I think the "any_cast<T>(&a)" is probably a holdover from the dark days that we should change.
My only other knowledge of "get" is from tuple, where "get" takes a compile-time constant, not a type, as an argument. With that background, I found the use of "get" for variant initially confusing. I think it'd be better to find a name with the "_cast" suffix and to explicitly specify pointer and reference types (as with dynamic_cast) and adopt that convention. I don't know enough about the various Boost libraries to know whether that is a reasonable suggestion. Scott