Look at this C++ code, for example:

DynamicAny any(”42?);
int i = any; // i == 42
any = 65536;
std::string s = any; // s == “65536”
char c = any; // too big, throws RangeException

or this:

std::cout << RecordSet(session, “SELECT * FROM Table”);

You may want to take a look at POCO

To be honest, coming from the power of Lisp’s macro systems, the power of the C++ template system is somewhat diminished in my eyes. I know it’s Turing-complete, and you can do a lot with template metaprogramming, but the amount of code and cleverness it usually takes is daunting.

Thank you for the recommendation, though, and I will look into that book next. It sounds interesting. In particular, I found that he apparently implements a solution in that book for one of my complaints – C++’s lack of multimethods. I’ll have to see how they work.