The Iterator Pattern is commonly used in Computer Science as a way to access elements of a collection, regardless of how they were implemented. An iterator may also be called a cursor.

__TOC__

An iterator may be though of as a kind of pointer that has two basic operations, referencing one particular element in a collection, and pointing to the next element in the collection. Depending on the language the iterator is implemented in, other functionality may be added to the iterator object.

An easy way to think of iterators, is to look at Linked Lists, because they operate very similarly.