Design Patterns in .NET: Reusable Approaches in C# and F# for Object-Oriented Software Design

Part IVBehavioral Patterns

Behavioral Patterns

When most people hear about behavioral patterns, it’s mainly in relation to animals and how to get them to do what you want. Well, in a way, all of coding is about programs doing what you want, so behavioral software design patterns cover a very wide range of behaviors that are, nonetheless, quite common in programming.

As an example, consider the domain of software engineering. We have languages that are compiled, which involves lexing, parsing, and a million other things (the Interpreter pattern). Having constructed an abstract syntax tree (AST) for a program, you might want to analyze the program for possible bugs (the Visitor pattern). All of these are behaviors that are common enough to be expressed ...