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In object-oriented programming, the iterator pattern is a design pattern in which an iterator is used to traverse a container and access the container's elements. The iterator pattern decouples algorithms from containers; in some cases, algorithms are necessarily container-specific and thus cannot be decoupled.
In computer science, a generator is a routine that can be used to control the iteration behaviour of a loop.All generators are also iterators. [1] A generator is very similar to a function that returns an array, in that a generator has parameters, can be called, and generates a sequence of values.
For example, the iterator method is supposed to return an Iterator object, and the pull-one method is supposed to produce and return the next value if possible, or return the sentinel value IterationEnd if no more values could be produced. The following example shows an equivalent iteration over a collection using explicit iterators:
For example, a vector would have a random-access iterator, but a list only a bidirectional iterator. Iterators are the major feature that allow the generality of the STL. For example, an algorithm to reverse a sequence can be implemented using bidirectional iterators, and then the same implementation can be used on lists, vectors and deques.
[10] [11] vector<bool> does not meet the requirements for a C++ Standard Library container. For instance, a container<T>::reference must be a true lvalue of type T. This is not the case with vector<bool>::reference, which is a proxy class convertible to bool. [12] Similarly, the vector<bool>::iterator does not yield a bool& when dereferenced.
Several iterator concepts are specified in the STL, each a refinement of more restrictive concepts e.g. forward iterators only provide movement to the next value in a sequence (e.g. suitable for a singly linked list or a stream of input data), whereas a random-access iterator also provides direct constant-time access to any element of the ...
Iterators constitute alternative language constructs to loops, which ensure consistent iterations over specific data structures. They can eventually save time and effort in later coding attempts. In particular, an iterator allows one to repeat the same kind of operation at each node of such a data structure, often in some pre-defined order.
Where some_iterable_object is either a data collection that supports implicit iteration (like a list of employee's names), or may be an iterator itself. Some languages have this in addition to another for-loop syntax; notably, PHP has this type of loop under the name for each , as well as a three-expression for-loop (see below) under the name for .