- 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
--
http://salilab.org/~ben/
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle