Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

Visitor generalizations and limitations

Our very first visitor, in the previous section, allowed us to effectively add a virtual function to every class in the hierarchy. That virtual function had no parameters and no return value. The former is easy to extend; there is no reason at all why our visit() functions cannot have parameters. Let's expand our class hierarchy by allowing our pets to have kittens and puppies. This extension cannot be done using only the Visitor pattern—we don't just need to add new operations, but also new data members to our classes. The Visitor pattern can be used for the former, but the latter requires code changes. A policy-based design could have let us factor this change out into a new implementation of an existing ...