Storing a list of arbitrary objects in C++

Question

In Java, you can have a List of Objects. You can add objects of multiple types, then retrieve them, check their type, and perform the appropriate action for that type.
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Answer 1

Just for completeness of this topic I want to mention that you can actually do this with pure C by using void* and then casting it into whatever it has to be (ok, my example isn't pure C since it uses vectors but that saves me some code). This will work if you know what type your objects are, or if you store a field somewhere which remembers that. You most certainly DON'T want to do this but here is an example to show that it's possible:

#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

int main() {

  int a = 4;
  string str = "hello";

  vector list;
  list.push_back( (void*) &a );
  list.push_back( (void*) &str );

  cout <<  * (int*) list[0] << "\t" << * (string*) list[1] << endl;

  return 0;
}