A
recent post described the basic structure of the Visitor design pattern for C++. We used the visitFoo()/accept() idiom presented in the
GoF book.
Now let's tweak the design a bit, to make things a little prettier, and to make it easier to derive classes from Visitor. After that, I'll need to do another post on
preprocessor tricks that generate boilerplate code and set up compile-time errors for common Visitor coding mistakes.
Cosmetic ChangesIt's a little awkward to invoke the Visitor code by calling a member function of the visited base class --
obj.accept(v) -- so let's add inline functions to Visitor to provide the more natural idiom of
v.visit(obj):
void visit(const Expression &e) {
e.accept(*this);
}
void visit(const Expression *e) {
if (e) {
e->accept(*this);
}
}
Note: this means that Visitor.hpp includes Expression.hpp. That is the correct dependency -- Visitors know more about Expressions than vice versa. Thus, Expression.hpp will declare
class Visitor instead of including Visitor.hpp.
Don't be tempted to use
operator()(const Expression &e) instead of
visit(). At first it sounds clever that you will be able to write
Print print(stream); print(obj);, but it's bewildering to new readers of your code, and it will even make you scratch your own head when you revisit that code a year into the future. It's much easier to read
Print printer(stream); printer.visit(obj);. Trust me, I've been there, trying to figure out what my own program was doing.
Next, I disagree with encoding the type names into the Visitor function names -- it sounds silly to read the declarations aloud:
visitOperation(Operation &) -- is there an echo in here? C++ has function overloading -- let's use it, and give all the Visitor members the same short name. We just used up
visit(), so we'll have to think of something else. For reasons that will make more sense in a moment, let's use the name
enter():
virtual void enter(const Variable &);
virtual void enter(const Number &);
virtual void enter(const Operation &);
A pleasant side effect of this is that there is less room for error when you change the name of a class. If the type name is encoded in the function name, and you forget to change the function name in a concrete visitor, you have just disabled the visitor for that type.
Ease-of-useLet's fix some usability defects in the basic Visitor implementation. The worst one is that a recursive operation has to know the structure of the visited objects -- see
Print::visitOperation() in the earlier post. That is a breakdown of encapsulation, or responsibility, or both.
On the other hand, some concrete Visitors do
not want to recurse into subobjects -- they just want to operate on the one visited object. To accomodate both kinds of Visitor, we move the recursiveness into
accept() -- makes sense, it's the object's responsibility -- but change the signature of
enter() to allow the derived Visitor to choose whether to recurse or not, by returning either true (recurse) or false (don't).
Now the
enter() prototypes look like this:
virtual bool enter(const Variable &);
virtual bool enter(const Number &);
virtual bool enter(const Operation &);
The no-op defaults in the base class return
false. I went around and around with myself on the question of whether to make recursion the default, but I think the answer is, If your Visitor works harder by recursing, it should require more code to get it done -- overriding the defaults to recurse where needed.
Now that responsibility for recursion has returned to the visited hierarchy,
Operation::accept() looks like this:
void Operation::accept(Visitor &v) const
{
if (v.enter(*this)) {
std::vector<Expression *>::const_iterator it;
for (it = operands().begin();
it != operands().end();
++it) {
const Expression *e = *it;
v.visit(e);
}
v.exit(*this);
}
}
Handling recursion in the object does the trick most of the time, but the sad thing is, it
still doesn't fix the encapsulation issue with our pretty-printer example. To print an infix expression, the Print Visitor has to know the structure of Operator. That's just a fact of life, but if we change the Visitor interface just a tiny bit, we can at least print expressions in prefix and postfix notations without loss of encapsulation. All that's needed is an
exit() function to correspond to the
enter() function, which will close parentheses for prefix expressions, or print the operator for postfix expressions.
As you can guess, the
exit() function returns void, and the default implementation in abstract base Visitor does nothing. If you have sharp eyes, you'll notice that I already added a call to it in
Operation::accept() above. It only gets called if the Visitor chose to recurse. Now a postfix pretty-printer is much simpler than the infix version presented in the earlier post:
bool Postfixer::enter(const Variable &v)
{
_str << v.name() << " ";
return false;
}
bool Postfixer::enter(const Number &n)
{
_str << n.value() << " ";
return false;
}
bool Postfixer::enter(const Operation &o)
{
return true;
}
void Postfixer::exit(const Operation &o)
{
_str << o.symbol() << " ";
}
Most importantly, it knows nothing about the structure of Operation.
This post has dragged on long enough, but there is one last ease-of-use improvement I want to make to our Visitor. It must implement the
Default Visitor idiom, which makes the double-dispatch polymorphic in both parameters. In simpler terms, if the concrete visitor does not implement, say,
enter(Foo &), the default action is not "do nothing", it is
enter(ParentOfFoo &). It's hard to visualize the benefit of this in my tiny toy example, but in a realistic hierarchy -- for example, a language hierarchy with abstract Declarations, Statements, and Expressions -- it often saves a lot of coding. Note that in our example, it means we have to add a function to Visitor that hasn't been there before:
enter(Expression &).
Next up, some preprocessor magic which generates a lot of the code for these Visitors -- including the Default Visitor fallbacks -- and which also gives you distant early warning of certain common typos.
book. But I have found it useful in several projects, and would like to share some Visitor tricks I've learned along the way.