From: Rajarshi G. <raj...@gm...> - 2010-10-21 12:34:57
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On Oct 21, 2010, at 6:53 AM, Egon Willighagen wrote: > On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Jules Kerssemakers > Alternatively, we define an UndefinedIsotope class, which formalizes > that we do not know the isotope, and another class for MixedIsotope > (for natural abundance mixtures, or so), etc, etc... Why would we need MixedIsotope? An atom can only ever be associated with a single isotope? Rather, a molecule may have atoms with different isotopic information >> Singletons could still work, but then we would need a helluva lot of >> classes for every element-massnumber combination. > > Which we can autogenerate :) > >> class carbon8 extends isotope {..} >> class carbon9 extends isotope {..} >> .. >> class carbon22 extends isotope {..} >> >> That's 14 hard-coded classes just for carbon! > > I have no problem with that. I'm not so sure about this - a multitude of classes starts polluting the name space. I rather prefer separate Isotope and Element classes and using composition (as opposed to hierarchy) to get the resultant object ---------------------------------------------------- Rajarshi Guha | NIH Chemical Genomics Center http://www.rguha.net | http://ncgc.nih.gov ---------------------------------------------------- A beer delayed is a beer denied. |