“Handler” pattern?

Question

I\'ve come across a design pattern that\'s been referred to as a \"Handler Pattern,\" but I can\'t find any real references to this pattern anywhere. It\'s basically just a

Answer 1

I don't know if it's really recommended, but I've actually had to use that kind of pattern in some MATLAB applications I've written to mimic reference-like behavior for objects (which is needless now with newer versions).

Ironically, I actually called the function "handler". My object simply stored one field containing a function handle reference (@handler) and methods were just wrappers that called this function. For example, an overloaded GET function for the object would just call:

object.handler('get',...input argument list...)

I'm not sure if this is considered a "good" design choice in other languages. I chose it out of necessity, because it was the only way I came across to create reference-like behavior in MATLAB (the handler function had access to a workspace of initialized data that I wouldn't have to pass in and out of the various method calls). The newest versions of MATLAB now have a HANDLE class that can do this stuff in a much cleaner way.