This page gathers informal definitions of the terms (and jargon) used within MEPP2 code and documentation

Concept: a concept (as defined by BCCL) is a set of requirements (valid expressions, associated types, semantic invariants, complexity guarantees, etc.) that a type must fulfil to be correctly used as arguments in a call to a generic algorithm. A concept can be thought as a form of API (in the context of generic algorithms). Refer to /ref ConceptsPage "FEVV concepts page" for more.

Filter: a data processing software component that receives data from other components, modifies the data in some way, and then delivers the modified data as output to be used by other components. Filters may e.g. extract some portion of a large mesh or point cloud, subsample data to coarser resolution, interpolate data to a finer resolution, merge/combine multiple inputs into a combined output, compute derived geometrical or topological information. The filter notion is imported from VTK.

Generic: within MEPP2, generic code (e.g. function, helpers) is code that is independent from any mesh data structure.

Operator: an Operator is a software component that acts on a Data Structure (DS) and that does local modifications (either topological and/or geometrical) of that DS or computes derived information (including predicates) of that DS.
For example the split_edge.hpp is an operator that modifies the local topology and triangle_area() derives geometrical information (area) out of the vertices geometry.

Wrapper: a wrapper of a (software) component is an abstraction layer that enables to promote the component in order to be used in compliance with a given (third party) interface (i.e. a collection of operations). MEPP2 main objective is to offer a (concept based) abstraction layer to allow mesh developers to produce algorithm/filters that can be used (instantiated) over a variety of mesh implementations. For another example of wrappers, within the context of mesh data structures, refer to CGAL's BGL wrappers documentation.