Question

Setting:
A pseudo-random pattern has to be generated. There are several ways / or algorithms availible to create different content. All algorithms will generate a list of chars (but could be anything else)… the important part is, that all of them return the same type of values, and need the same type of input arguments.

It has to be possible to call a method GetRandomPattern(), which will use a random one of the algorithms everytime it is called.

My first aproach was to put each algorithm in it’s own function and select a random one of them each time GetRandompattern() is called. But I didn’t come up with another way of choosing between them, than with a switch case statement which is unhandy, ugly and inflexible.

class PatternGenerator{
 public:
  list<char> GetRandomPattern();
 private:
  list<char>GeneratePatternA(foo bar);
  list<char>GeneratePatternB(foo bar);
  ........
  list<char>GeneratePatternX(foo bar);
}

What would be a good way to select a random GeneratePattern function every time the GetRandomPattern() method is called ?

Or should the whole class be designed differently ?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

Thank you for all your great input.
I decided to go with function pointers, mainly because I didn’t know them before and they seem to be very powerfull and it was a good chance to get to know them, but also because it saves me lot of lines of code.

If I’d be using Ruby / Java / C# I’d have decided for the suggested Strategy Design pattern 😉

class PatternGenerator{
 typedef list<char>(PatternGenerator::*createPatternFunctionPtr);
public:
 PatternGenerator(){
  Initialize();
   }
 GetRandomPattern(){
  int randomMethod = (rand()%functionPointerVector.size());
  createPatternFunctionPtr randomFunction = functionPointerVector.at( randomMethod );
  list<char> pattern = (this->*randomFunction)();
  return pattern;
  }
private:
  void Initialize(){
   createPatternFunctionPtr methodA = &PatternGenerator::GeneratePatternA;
   createPatternFunctionPtr methodB = &PatternGenerator::GeneratePatternB;
   ...
   functionPointerVector.push_back( methodA );
   functionPointerVector.push_back( methodB );
   }
  list<char>GeneratePatternA(){
   ...}
  list<char>GeneratePatternB(){
   ...}
  vector< createPattern > functionPointerVector;

The readability is not much worse as it would have been with the Design Pattern Solution, it’s easy to add new algorithms, the pointer arithmetics are capsuled within a class, it prevents memory leaks and it’s very fast and effective…