CGAL 5.0 - Handles and Circulators
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Most data structures in CGAL use the concept of Handle
in their user interface to refer to the elements they store. This concept describes what is sometimes called a trivial iterator. A Handle
is akin to a pointer to an object providing the dereference operator operator*()
and member access operator->()
but no increment or decrement operators like iterators. A Handle
is intended to be used whenever the referenced object is not part of a logical sequence.
Like iterators, the handle can be passed as template argument to std::iterators_traits
in order to extract its value_type
, the type of the element pointed to. The iterator_category
is void
.
The default constructed object must be unique as far as the equality operator is concerned (this serves the same purpose as NULL for pointers). (Note that this is not a generally supported feature of iterators of standard containers.)
T* (pointer)
const T* (const pointers)
Dereference | |
value_type & | operator* () |
returns the object pointed to. | |
value_type * | operator-> () |
returns a pointer to the object pointed to. | |