22.12. Runtime class information
When you have an array of polymorphic pointers, how do you tell what kind of class pointer you have? That is, after you set a cCritter* pcritter somewhere in your code, how can you tell if pcritter is just a cCritter* or whether it is perhaps a cCritterBullet* ? (For this discussion, assume that we have a cCritterBullet class that inherits from cCritter.) There are two ways to deal with this.
A hand-made way would be to keep a CString _classname field inside our cCritter class and set it to either cCritter or to cCritterBullet, depending on whether the object was constructed by the cCritter constructor or by the cCritterBullet constructor. And then you could find out if a cCritter * pcritter is really a cCritterBullet ...
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