A scanning visitor of program elements with default behavior appropriate for a preview source version. The visitXyz methods in this class scan their component elements by calling scan on their enclosed elements, parameters, etc., as indicated in the individual method specifications. A subclass can control the order elements are visited by overriding the visitXyz methods. Note that clients of a scanner may get the desired behavior by invoking v.scan(e, p) rather than v.visit(e, p) on the root objects of interest.

When a subclass overrides a visitXyz method, the new method can cause the enclosed elements to be scanned in the default way by calling super.visitXyz. In this fashion, the concrete visitor can control the ordering of traversal over the component elements with respect to the additional processing; for example, consistently calling super.visitXyz at the start of the overridden methods will yield a preorder traversal, etc. If the component elements should be traversed in some other order, instead of calling super.visitXyz, an overriding visit method should call scan with the elements in the desired order.