Patterns::PatternBase Class Reference

Inheritance diagram for Patterns::PatternBase:
Inheritance graph
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List of all members.

Public Member Functions

virtual ~PatternBase ()
virtual bool match (const std::string &test_string) const =0
virtual std::string description () const =0
virtual PatternBaseclone () const =0
virtual unsigned int memory_consumption () const

Detailed Description

Base class to declare common interface. The purpose of this class is mostly to define the interface of patterns, and to force derived classes to have a clone function. It is thus, in the languages of the "Design Patterns" book (Gamma et al.), a "prototype".


Constructor & Destructor Documentation

virtual Patterns::PatternBase::~PatternBase (  )  [virtual]

Make destructor of this and all derived classes virtual.


Member Function Documentation

virtual bool Patterns::PatternBase::match ( const std::string &  test_string  )  const [pure virtual]

Return true if the given string matches the pattern.

Implemented in Patterns::Integer, Patterns::Double, Patterns::Selection, Patterns::List, Patterns::MultipleSelection, and Patterns::Anything.

virtual std::string Patterns::PatternBase::description (  )  const [pure virtual]
virtual PatternBase* Patterns::PatternBase::clone (  )  const [pure virtual]

Return a pointer to an exact copy of the object. This is necessary since we want to store objects of this type in containers, were we need to copy objects without knowledge of their actual data type (we only have pointers to the base class).

Ownership of the objects returned by this function is passed to the caller of this function.

Implemented in Patterns::Integer, Patterns::Double, Patterns::Selection, Patterns::List, Patterns::MultipleSelection, Patterns::Bool, and Patterns::Anything.

virtual unsigned int Patterns::PatternBase::memory_consumption (  )  const [virtual]

Determine an estimate for the memory consumption (in bytes) of this object. To avoid unnecessary overhead, we do not force derivd classes to provide this function as a virtual overloaded one, but rather try to cast the present object to one of the known derived classes and if that fails then take the size of this base class instead and add 32 byte (this value is arbitrary, it should account for virtual function tables, and some possible data elements). Since there are usually not many thousands of objects of this type around, and since the memory_consumption mechanism is used to find out where memory in the range of many megabytes is, this seems like a reasonable approximation.

On the other hand, if you know that your class deviates from this assumption significantly, you can still overload this function.

Reimplemented in Patterns::Selection, Patterns::List, and Patterns::MultipleSelection.


The documentation for this class was generated from the following file:

deal.II documentation generated on Mon Nov 23 22:58:27 2009 by doxygen 1.6.1