Example of polymorphism working with data structure in C++ based on php example

Question

I am learning polymorphism and I am familiar with php.

I came across this excellent example from https://stackoverflow.com/a/749738/80353. reproduced below.

How

Answer 1

Since you only asked about storing them, I'll omit the implementation of Animal, Dog and Cat.

vector< shared_ptr > animals;
animals.push_back( new Dog("Skip") );
animals.push_back( new Cat("Snowball") );

for( size_t i = 0; i< animals.size(); ++i )
    cout << animals[i]->name << " says: " << animals[i]->speak() << endl;

Essentially you need to store pointers to the objects. Put simply, shared_ptr is a class that stores a pointer and deletes it when it is no longer referenced.