"Jody Hagins" <jody-boost-011304@atdesk.com> wrote in message news:20050323172054.5743c220.jody-boost-011304@atdesk.com...
Does that make sense, or just make it more confusing?!?
OK, now I understand where my confusion was coming from. I associated the behavior of boost::any_cast with the way dynamic_cast works. Dynamic cast uses: dynamic_cast<Derived &>(base); // A bad_cast exception gets thrown if the conversion is not possible dynamic_cast<Derived *>(pBase); // A zero is returned if the conversion fails now, with any_cast: any_cast<std::string>(myAny); // Throws bad_any_cast if not possible, similar to dynamic_cast with references any_cast<std::string>(&myAny); // Attempts to cast &myAny to a string pointer, returning zero on failure. The final example is what confused me, when I tried to relate it to dynamic_cast. I think that the template argument is counterintuitive. Maybe it should have been implemented as: any_cast<std::string *>(&myAny); // Instead, in order to more resemble dynamic_cast behavior with pointers In any case, I now understand what it is doing. Perhaps this difference from dynamic cast should be documented more explicitly. Thanks, Michael Goldshteyn