Enum thru vector with many diff types of obj?

Question

lets say i have vector 'food' which contains a bunch of objects of different classes, like 'bread' and 'cheese', if i wanted to enumerate through them, how would i go about doing that? i know how to enumerate through a vector with the knowledge that all the objects in it are of the same class, like Food currentFood = (Food)enum.nextElement() , but i dont see how to make variable type dynamic

Answer 1

If you have a vector where all the elements are Food, then you can safely cast each element to Food and call Food methods on each element.
If one of the elements is a Bread, and Bread has a method that isn't present in Food, then you can't call that method without first checking to see if the element is a Bread and casting it. But ideally you should be designing such that this isn't an issue.
For example, Bread may have a bake() method, and ChocolateMilk may have a mix() method. But rather than using instanceof on each Food to see if it's a Bread or a ChocolateMilk, and then calling either bake() or mix(), it's better to have a method prepare() in the Food class. Then you just call prepare() on each object. It may be that Bake.prepare() does nothing more than invoke bake(), but the point is that the caller doesn't need to know that.
That may not be the best example.