Re: Helper functions

[Daniel Russel <drussel@salilab.org>]

> Well, I was thinking from the other direction - a container class  
> which can contain particles and/or other containers. So for  
> example, a rigid body would be a simple container of particles, a  
> residue would be similar, while a chain would be a container of  
> residues. (Whether you have an actual Residue class derived from  
> Container, and whether it's done at the C++ or Python level, is  
> debatable.) The two approaches are, of course, essentially equivalent.
To cover a loose end in my last email, I am not sure that providing a  
subclass of Particle called Container which provides more direct  
access to children and parents would be such a good idea. Why should  
we just do it for Containers? Why not geometric particles? Spherical  
particles? If we head that route we should probably just chuck the  
get_string, get_int sort of access entirely and just have a real  
class hierarchy.