> No, my good sir, ten times no. The iterator pattern as was discussed (in Design Patterns, and such and so), has nothing to do with that construct. Iterators speak polymorphism out loud, freeing us from finities and the rest of the crowd.
That is not entirely true, internal iterators in the style of Smalltalk and Ruby have all the capabilities of GOF-style external iterators, and jQuery (or underscore's) each is a restricted kind of internal iterator.
And while that is (sadly) not supported at the moment these could very well delegate to an arbitrary implementor of Javascript's own internal iterator protocols (JS 1.6's "Array extras"), leading exactly to the capabilities you describe (including but not limited to polymorphism).
Furthermore, external iterators are of little use, value and class when you have blocks, or at least "full" anonymous functions. It's unsurprising to have them in the C++ and Java-based GOF, but they don't belong anywhere near JavaScript.
That is not entirely true, internal iterators in the style of Smalltalk and Ruby have all the capabilities of GOF-style external iterators, and jQuery (or underscore's) each is a restricted kind of internal iterator.
And while that is (sadly) not supported at the moment these could very well delegate to an arbitrary implementor of Javascript's own internal iterator protocols (JS 1.6's "Array extras"), leading exactly to the capabilities you describe (including but not limited to polymorphism).
Furthermore, external iterators are of little use, value and class when you have blocks, or at least "full" anonymous functions. It's unsurprising to have them in the C++ and Java-based GOF, but they don't belong anywhere near JavaScript.