Scott Meyer in his book Effective C++ says dynamic_cast is used to perform safe casts down or across an inheritance hierarchy. That is, you use dynamic_cast to cast pointers or references to base class objects into pointers or references to derived or sibling base class objects in such a way that you can determine whether the casts succeeded.
Failed casts are indicated by a null pointer (when casting pointers) or an exception (when casting references).
I would like to get two code snippet showing the failed cast in the case of casting pointer and casting reference can be indicated.