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The Visitor [1] design pattern is one of the twenty-three well-known Gang of Four design patterns that describe how to solve recurring design problems to design flexible and reusable object-oriented software, that is, objects that are easier to implement, change, test, and reuse.
The single-serving visitor pattern should be used when visitors do not need to remain in memory. This is often the case when visiting a hierarchy of objects (such as when the visitor pattern is used together with the composite pattern) to perform a single task on it, for example counting the number of cameras in a 3D scene.
Pattern Name and Classification: A descriptive and unique name that helps in identifying and referring to the pattern. Intent: A description of the goal behind the pattern and the reason for using it. Also Known As: Other names for the pattern. Motivation (Forces): A scenario consisting of a problem and a context in which this pattern can be used.
Using a visitor is a complementary approach to doing something with a collection of objects. In particular, a core idea of the visitor pattern is that you can prescribe different operations for different polymorphic (or static) types you visit. Also, with the visitor pattern, different objects have control over traversal order.
The use and mechanics of agents ensure this. One possible downside of the use of agents is that an agent is computationally more expensive than its direct call counterpart. With this in mind, one ought never to presume the use of agents in the double-dispatch and their application in visitor patterns.
When using subclassing, different subclasses extend a class in different ways. However, an extension is bound to the class at compile-time and can't be changed at run-time. The decorator pattern allows responsibilities to be added (and removed from) an object dynamcally at run-time. It is achieved by defining Decorator objects that
Virtual functions are simple to write, but it is usually impossible to add new operations to nodes without access to the source code. Alternatively, the visitor pattern can be used. This has a similar disadvantage in that it is similarly difficult to add new node types. Other techniques involve the use of RTTI (Run-Time Type Information).
The above example can be realized using the visitor pattern. It would require each animal class to implement an accept method accepting an object implementing the interface AnimalVisitor (adding non-local boilerplate code). The function animalToFood would be realized as the visit method of an implementation of AnimalVisitor.