Difference in behavior while using dynamic_cast with reference and pointers

Question

I was checking the behavior of dynamic_cast and found that when it fails, std::bad_cast exception is thrown only if the destination is a reference type. If the destination i

Answer 1

Yes, this is correct behaviour. The reason is that you can have a null pointer, but not a null reference - any reference has to be bound to an object.

So when dynamic_cast for a pointer type fails it returns a null pointer and the caller can check for that, but when it fails for a reference type it can't return a null reference, so an exception is the only reasonable way to signal a problem.