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.
That is certainly a possibility. I'm trying to see how we'd use the
existing attributes to encode hierarchy without having to add a lot of
logic to them, and I agree with you that if we need to do that, we'll
probably either be going down the inner platform road or will need to
use real classes.