Shibboleth Developers

[Scott Cantor <>]

> So in other words I should be able to safely dynamic_cast<> 
> any of my own objects, but I may need to work around times 
> where I cast a SAML or Shib object.

That's about the best summation I could give you at this point.

> What about when I use a saml object's
> clone() method -- is that safe to dynamic_cast<> back to itself?

It will probably crash, but that's a safe static_cast, since you know
what you just cloned (unless you're cloning something in a really
generic way).

In fact, the C++ standard apparently now permits virtual functions to
have overridden return types, if the type is a pointer or reference to
the derived class. So the proper way to build clone() type interfaces is
by having each virtual override of clone() return a pointer of that
class type.

Unfortunately, almost no compilers support that yet, so I can't do it.

-- Scott

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