Re: [Boost-users] Syntax of get for Variant and any_cast for Any

From: Scott Meyers (usenet_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-10 17:04:07

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