New Cast Operations

The C++ standard defines new cast operations that provide finer control than previous cast operations. The dynamic_cast<> operator provides a way to check the actual type of a pointer to a polymorphic class. You can search with a text editor for all new-style casts (search for _cast), whereas finding old-style casts required syntactic analysis.

Otherwise, the new casts all perform a subset of the casts allowed by the classic cast notation. For example, const_cast<int*>(v) could be written (int*)v. The new casts simply categorize the variety of operations available to express your intent more clearly and allow the compiler to provide better checking.

The cast operators are always enabled in C++ 5.0. They cannot be disabled.