The VISITOR Pattern as a Reusable, Generic, Type-Safe Component

Journal article

The Visitor design pattern shows how to separate the structure of an object hierarchy from the behaviour of traversals over that hierarchy. The pattern is very flexible; this very flexibility makes it difficult to capture the pattern as anything more formal than prose, pictures and prototypes. We show how to capture the essence of the Visitor pattern as a reusable software library, by using advanced type system features appearing in modern object-oriented languages such as Scala. We preserve ...

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Authors: Oliveira, B; Wang, M; Gibbons, J

• Publication status: Published
• Journal: ACM SIGPLAN NOTICES
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 10
• Pages: 439-456
• Publication date: 2008-09-01
• DOI: 10.1145/1449955.1449799
• ISSN: 0362-1340
• Language: English
• Keywords: Algebraic Datatypes; Traversal; Design Patterns; Visitor Pattern; Design; Software Components; Languages; Program Extensibility