Chapter 11. The Conversion Library 1.7

Bjarne Stroustrup

Dave Abrahams

Boris Rasin

Antony Polukhin

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

Description

The Conversion Library improves program safety and clarity by performing otherwise messy conversions. It includes cast-style function templates designed to complement the C++ Standard's built-in casts.

To reduce coupling, particularly to standard library IOStreams, the Boost Conversion Library is supplied by several headers:

The boost/polymorphic_cast.hpp header provides polymorphic_cast<> and polymorphic_downcast<> to perform safe casting between polymorphic types.
The boost/polymorphic_pointer_cast.hpp header provides polymorphic_pointer_cast<> and polymorphic_pointer_downcast<>
The boost/implicit_cast.hpp header provides implicit_cast<> to perform implicit casts only (no down-cast, no void*->T*, no U->T if T has only explicit constructors for U).
The boost/lexical_cast.hpp header provides lexical_cast<> general literal text conversions, such as an int represented as a string, or vice-versa.

| |