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ROS used to have messages with a common base class. Switching to templated messages made things faster and enabled custom datatypes with custom serialization.
You can find the relevant changelog here: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/ChangeList/1.2/roscpp_changes The behaviour has been moved into templated traits.
Some of the in process reviews are linked from there to here and here
There are techniques to operate on the data as @Wolf points out. Shape Shifter is an example of how to work with messages without fully knowing their type.