Thread: Generalizing actions for a binary tree traversal?

I'm trying to find a way that I could take a binary tree class and traverse through it's nodes, performing X inline actions on each node without having to rewrite the same traversal code.
If Java allowed function pointers, this would be much simpler for me to write.

Basically, what I need is something like the following:

public class BinaryTreeNode {
	public String identifier = "";
	public BinaryTreeNode parent = null;
	public BinaryTreeNode left = null;
	public BinaryTreeNode right = null;
 
	public BinaryTreeNode(BinaryTreeNode parent, String identifier) {
		this.parent = parent;
		this.identifier = identifier;
	}
 
	public boolean isRoot() {
		return parent == null;
	}
 
	public void inOrderTraversalFrom(BinaryTreeNode node, /* ??? */ actions) {
		if(node.left != null)
			inOrderTraversalFrom(node.left);
 
		/* do something with "actions" here */
 
		if(node.right != null)
			inOrderTraversalFrom(node.right);
	}
}

... where actions could allow for different methods to be performed, taking in a different set of parameters depending on the type of action(s) to be performed on each node.
How is this possible? What would be the most dynamic way to perform this?

Answered at java - Generalizing actions for a binary tree traversal? - Stack Overflow

Take a look at this:

	public static interface IFunction<T> {
 
		public void callFunction(T t);
 
	}
 
	private static IFunction<String> functionPointer = new IFunction<String>() {
 
		@Override
		public void callFunction(String t) {
			System.out.println(t);
 
		}
	};
 
	public static final List<IFunction<?>> functions = new ArrayList<>();
 
	{
		functions.add(functionPointer);
	}
 
 
	public void inOrderTraversalFrom(BinaryTreeNode node, List<IFunction<?>> actions) {
		if(node.left != null)
			inOrderTraversalFrom(node.left, null);
 
		IFunction<String> func = (IFunction<String>) actions.get(0);
 
		func.callFunction("Hello function pointer");
 
		if(node.right != null)
			inOrderTraversalFrom(node.right, null);
	}

That's a quick and dirty solution but that's a kind of function pointing in java.

You can use generic parameter to change the parameters but you must declare parameter classes for each function signature.