Just what it says in the title. I know you can't register template methods on objects, but it's recently occurred to me that cast appears to use a templated function. Is that something that's built into the language, or can it be repeated in user code?

I'm working on a few classes that expose reflection to the scripting language, and currently I've got it set up like this:

• I have a Type class, which has no default factory. It requires a parameter of type __typeof.
• I have a Typeof class, which is registered with the engine as both __typeof and typeof<T>.
• typeof<T> is implicitly convertable to __typeof.
• __typeof has no factory defined at all, so it can only be created from an instance of typeof<T>.

It's a convoluted setup, but ultimately it allows me to do this:

Type myType(typeof<MyClass>())

What I'm wondering now is whether I can make a function that behaves in the same way as cast<T>(), with the end result being a syntax that looks like this:

Type myType = typeof<MyClass>();

Of course, the best possible result would be to mimic C# syntax exactly, but I don't think that's possible;

Type myType = typeof(MyClass);

cast<T>() is not registered. This is a built-in function, and serves the same purpose as dynamic_cast<T>() in C++.

You can implement the opImplConv overload in the typeof<T>() class to allow it to be implicitly converted to the Type object.

You may want to take a look at this post. cvet has already implemented and shared code that does exactly what you want.

I assumed that would be the case. The implicit cast trick is a good one (and I actually realized I could do it while writing this post), the only drawback is that you have to assign it before you can use the properties or methods of the Type class...though I suppose I could register the same members to both types.

That post looks great! I'll definitely check his code out. Thanks for the reply.