I need to write a program implementing the visitor design pattern. The problem is that the base visitor class is a template class. This means that BaseVisited::accept() takes a template class as a parameter and since it uses 'this' and i need 'this' to point to the correct runtime instance of the object, it also needs to be virtual.
I'd like to know if there's any way around this problem.
template <typename T>
class BaseVisitor {
public:
BaseVisitor();
T visit(BaseVisited *visited);
virtual ~BaseVisitor();
}
class BaseVisited {
BaseVisited();
template <typename T>
virtual void accept(BaseVisitor<T> *visitor) { visitor->visit(this); }; // problem
virtual ~BaseVisited();
}
What you should do is separate the BaseVisitor.
class BaseVisited;
class BaseVisitorInternal {
public:
virtual void visit(BaseVisited*) = 0;
virtual ~BaseVisitorInternal() {}
};
class BaseVisited {
BaseVisited();
virtual void accept(BaseVisitorInternal* visitor) { visitor->visit(this); }
};
template<typename T> class BaseVisitor : public BaseVisitorInternal {
void visit(BaseVisited* visited);
};
If you need BaseVisited's derived classes to be templated too AND pass their correct types/overloads to visit, you're officially dead.