What is an Anonymous Object?

Question

What is an Anonymous Object exactly?

Does C++ support/have Anonymous Objects?

Answer 1

This is a simplistic answer, but an anonymous object is basically an object which the compiler creates a class for.

For example in C# (I know this is kinda irrelevant) you can just create an anonymous type by doing:

new { filename = value }.

The compiler effectively creates a class called AnonSomething1 [A random name you don't know] which has those fields. Therefore at that point you just created an instance of that AnonSomething1. C++ does not allow you to make anonymous class types inline (like Java and C# which have a base Object class which the anon types can derive).

However you can make an anonymous struct by simply writing

struct { 
    int field1; 
    std::string field2; 
} myanonstruct; 

which creates an anonymous struct and instantiates it with the alias myanonstruct. This C++ code does not define a type, it just creates an anonymous one with 1 instance.

See C#: Anon Types

See Java: Anon Types

See C++ Structs: msdn