In the last installment of this series, I built a basic undo facility on top of the command pattern. One of the problems with that implementation is that the Command class has to know too much about how to save and restore the overall state of the calculator. In this post, I’ll introduce a way around this problem.
To see the problem, note that every instance of `Commandq has a private member variable for each global state variable maintained by the calculator:
private Deque<Double> oldStack;
private Double[] oldRegs;
Commands also have methods to save and restore the global state from the calculator instance itself:
void saveState()
{
oldStack = new LinkedList<Double>(stack);
oldRegs = Arrays.copyOf(regs, regs.length);
}
void restoreState()
{
stack = new LinkedList<Double>(oldStack);
regs = Arrays.copyOf(oldRegs, oldRegs.length);
}
Aside from the fact that Commands are directly updating the global state of the calculator, this design makes it more difficult to extend or modify the calculator’s notion of state. Any change to the calculator’s design that that adds a global state variable forces the Command class to be extended to manage the new global state. This means at least adding new private fields to Command and updating saveState and restoreState implementations. The stateobject version of RpnCalc addresses this issue by introducing a new class for the purpose of managing calculator state: State.
As you might have guessed, State has the two fields we need to store our current notion of state:
Deque<Double> stack = null;
Double[] regs = null;
There are also two constructors, one for constructing a new, blank state, and a copy constructor for duplicating an existing state:
State()
{
stack = new LinkedList<Double>();
regs = new Double[NUM_REGISTERS];
}
State(State original)
{
stack = new LinkedList<Double>(original.stack);
regs = Arrays.copyOf(original.regs, original.regs.length);
}
The State class simplifies the calculator’s state variable declaration down to a single member variable:
private State state = null;
Along with that simplification, Command no longer needs to worry about state management, so it’s back down to a single method:
abstract class Command
{
abstract State execute(State in);
}
The biggest change here is that the execute method now returns an instance of State. With state objects, the behavior of a command is now that it accepts a ‘before’ state, and then returns the state that results from applying the command to the output state. Every implementation of Command, save for two, first makes a copy of the state using the copy constructor, and then updates the copied state and returns it to the caller. The command doesn’t touch the input state, aside from the initial copy operation (which isn’t an update).
At this point, you might want to re-read that last paragraph - it’s kind of a big deal. With this latest change to the calculator, we’ve really made two big improvements. The first is the change that motivated the post in the first place: Commands no longer need to know how to save and restore state and the no longer need to be aware of the contents of that state. The second change is that Commands are no longer modifying global state at all. Each command is now a Function, mapping from state to state.
This second aspect of the design change has many positive implications, but the first is that it makes it easier to implement undo. Because the input state passed into Command.execute isn’t touched, the caller can save off a copy of the previous state in its entirety. The calculator’s main command loop does just that:
Command cmd = parseCommandString(cmdLine);
State initialState = state;
state = cmd.execute(state);
LastState = initialState; // (lastState is an instance variable alongside state)
The undo command itself just ignores its input state and returns whatever the lastState was:
cmds.put("undo", new Command() {
public State execute(State in) {
return lastState;
}
});
This version of the calculator gets us most of the way to a mathematically functional implementation. The next installment will take us further by removing state and lastState.