I was looking into other questions related to the visitor pattern but couldn't understand the implementation of double dispatch in visitor pattern.
Please refer to the link Visitor Pattern
How does double dispatch work in the Visitor pattern?
Single-dispatch
Assume Node is an interface class and the two sub classes are concrete implementations of the interface.
If you call GenerateCode()
method on a node instance, the actual operation getting executed depends on the type of the node. It could be the method either in VariableRefNode
or AssignmentNode
. It's the same if you call PrettyPrint()
. So the actual operation getting executed depends on name of the method you are calling and the type of the node.
Double-dispatch
This time the Node
is allowing you to pass a parameter of type NodeVisitor
to its method called Accept
. In your program if you call Accept
on a node instance, the actual operation getting executed now depends on the type of the node (VariableRefNode
or AssignmentNode
) AND the type of the visitor instance you passed into Accept
(TypeCheckingVisitor
or CodeGeneratingVisitor
).