Handle Concept Reference

Definition

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.

Refines:

Descriptor

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.)

Has Models:

T* (pointer)

const T* (const pointers)

Iterator

Circulator

Dereference
value_type &	operator* ()
	returns the object pointed to.
value_type *	operator-> ()
	returns a pointer to the object pointed to.