C++ POOL — DAY 14 MORNING

Recovering the real type of an object hidden behind an abstraction — without getting it wrong.

When you handle objects through a common interface, you deliberately lose the information about their real type. Sometimes you have to recover it: this basket contains fruit, but which ones are lemons? C++ offers several tools for that, only one of which is genuinely safe — and the morning consists in understanding why.

dynamic_cast applied to a Fruit / Banana / Lemon / Lime / Coconut hierarchy stored in a FruitBox (a linked list of FruitNode), plus const_cast to regain write access to an array of Coconut declared doubly const.