20 General utilities library [utilities]

20.8 Storage for any type [any]

20.8.1 General [any.general]

Subclause [any] describes components that C++ programs may use to perform operations on objects of a discriminated type.
[Note 1:
The discriminated type can contain values of different types but does not attempt conversion between them, i.e., 5 is held strictly as an int and is not implicitly convertible either to "5" or to 5.0.
This indifference to interpretation but awareness of type effectively allows safe, generic containers of single values, with no scope for surprises from ambiguous conversions.
— end note]