variable return type in c++ class

Question

i have a class with the following structure:

class myClass
{
    private:
        int type;
        classOne objectOne;
        classTwo objectTwo;
    public:
          


        

Answer 1

Unless the two types are related (in which case you can create a function that will return a pointer/reference to the common ancestor) you cannot do that directly in C++.

C++ is a statically typed language, meaning that the type of every expression must be known at compile time, but you are trying to define a function whose return type depends on runtime values.

Depending on the particular problem to solve, there might be different approaches that you could take, including using type erasure (return a boost::any, boost::variant or your own type-erasure).