Patterns for C Iterator Interfaces

Abstract

Iterating over a set of elements is a very common operation in any program. Some programming languages provide native constructs to iterate over elements and for object-oriented progamming languages there exists guidance in form of design patterns on how to implement generic iteration functionality. However, there is just very few guidance of this kind for procedural programming languages like C. This paper provides such guidance and presents three patterns on how to design generic iterator interfaces in C.