Re: How to compare object types in C++?

From:
"Thomas J. Gritzan" <Phygon_ANTISPAM@gmx.de>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:22:37 +0200
Message-ID:
<f5m5oe$59r$1@newsreader3.netcologne.de>
Bryan wrote:

Several people asked why I was doing this so Ill try to explain:

I have the following Cell class:
class Cell
{
...
    CellType m_type;
}


m_type here is __always__ of type CellType. Polymorphism only works on
pointers and references. Let's assume it's a pointer:

CellType* m_type;

Where CellType is like this:
class AntigenPresentingCellType : public CellType {};
class DendriticCellType : public AntigenPresentingCellType {};

[...more cell types...]

Now I can use the type objects to determine easily if a Cell object is
of type CD4 like so:
m_type.IsKindOf(RUNTIME_CLASS(CD4CellType))


You can do this with RTTI like so:

if (dynamic_cast<CD4CellType*>(m_type)) != NULL)
{
   // m_type points to a CD4CellType or derived type.
}

So now I want to see if I have two cells if cell1.m_type ==
cell2.m_type. I was thinking that I just need to know if cell1.m_type
is an object of the same class as cell2.type.


With RTTI:
   if (typeid(*cell1.m_type) == typeid(*cell2.m_type))
   { /* same type */ }

If your type objects are singletons (there is only one object of each type
class and m_type only points to one of this objects), you could compare the
pointers to see if the cells have the same CellType.

--
Thomas
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

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