Behavioral Patterns - Iterator Pattern Exercise

Most languages provide an interface to the iterator pattern. We will implement the interface to create an iterable polyline data type. This exercise is fun enough that challenges your fundamental programming skills on the data structures and algorithms.

Reading Materials

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterator_pattern (10 minutes reading)

Practice Materials

1. Create a class called Polyline that implements the iterator pattern.

• The Polyline class could be used inside of a foreach loop to retrieve each point without exposing the index of them.
• The Polyline class should provide methods to extend polyline.
• The Polyline class should provide methods to remove points from polyline over the iteration.
• The Polyline class can only use the array as underlining data structure.

Tips

• each language has their own interface to the iterator pattern, take advantage of that to implement the Polyline class.
• array has fixed size. When there is no space in the array, we could create a new array that doubles the size of the current one, and copy items over. On the other hand, after enough items are removed from the array, we could compress the array to utilize the current space to avoid unnecessary space expansion.

Solution

Polyline Example

Questions to discuss

1. What are the benefits using the iterator pattern?
2. When could we use the iterator pattern?