Applications of the Generic Programming Paradigm in the Design of CGAL. Hervé Brönnimann, Lutz Kettner, Stefan Schirra, and Remco Veltkamp. In: M. Jazayeri, R. Loos, and D. Musser (Eds.), Generic Programming - Proceedings of a Dagstuhl Seminar, LNCS 1766, Springer, pp. 206-217, 2000.
We report on the use of the generic programming paradigm in the computational geometry algorithms library CGAL. The parameterization of the geometric algorithms in CGAL enhances flexibility and adaptability and opens an easy way for abolishing precision and robustness problems by exact but nevertheless efficient computation. Furthermore we discuss circulators, which are an extension of the iterator concept to circular structures. Such structures arise frequently in geometric computing.