Analysis
Compare patterns
Evaluate design patterns side by side across intent, tradeoffs, languages, and integration fit.
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Analysis
Pattern comparison
Reviewing 3 patterns.
| Criteria | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Basics | |||
| Category | behavioral | behavioral | behavioral |
| Summary | — | — | — |
| Intent | Provide a way to access elements of an aggregate sequentially while hiding the underlying representation. | Allow an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes by delegating state-specific behavior to separate state objects. | Separate an algorithm from the object structure it operates on by moving behavior into visitor objects. |
| Decision factors | |||
| Problem | A collection needs to be traversed without exposing how it is stored internally. | An object behaves differently depending on its internal state, and conditional logic is becoming hard to manage. | You need to perform operations across a set of different object types without stuffing all the logic into the objects themselves. |
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| Practical fit | |||
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| Integration notes | Iterator is useful for pagination, custom collections, ordered traversal, and any case where clients should not know the internal data structure. | State is useful for workflows, media players, order lifecycles, and any domain where behavior changes as the object moves through a lifecycle. | Visitor is useful for AST processing, reporting, cart calculations, and exporting object structures to alternate formats. |