[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [IMP-dev] Names for particles



Daniel Russel wrote:
- It is probably worthwhile to have a name for each particle which uniquely identifies the particle.
Can't we just use a regular string attribute for this? I don't much like 
the idea of adding another set of get/set methods purely for this 
purpose. And in many cases, we don't really care what the particles are 
called. Thus, I don't like the idea of wasting the memory needed to 
store all those strings, and having to make sure all the particles have 
unique dummy names (and presumably having to do a hash lookup for every 
new particle). Output methods can use the 'name' string attribute if 
there is one in any case. For reading in particles where you do care 
about not duplicating names, surely it's straightforward to provide a 
method to look up a particle by a given string attribute, so that you 
can decide on a case by case basis what to do about duplicated names 
(e.g. rename, combine the two particles in some way, throw an exception, 
or use only the new or existing particle). Why not just have a Model 
method to add an index for a given StringKey? This would create and then 
maintain a hash to allow rapid lookup of particles by values of that 
StringKey. I imagine this would be useful for things other than a simple 
'name'.
	Ben
--
ben@salilab.org                      http://salilab.org/~ben/
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
	- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle