initially, the intention was to inject the type as a magic attribute.
But this turned out to make the implementation brittle, asymmetric
and either quite demanding, or inefficient.
The only sane approach would be to introduce a third collection,
the metadata attributes. Then it would be possible to handle these
automatically, but expose them through the iterator.
In the end I decided against it, just the type attribute
allone does not justify that effort. So now the type is an
special magic field and kept apart from any object data.
I decided to allow for an 'unbound' reference to allow
default construction of elements involving record references.
I am aware of the implications, but I place the focus
on the value nature of GenNode elements; the RecordRef
was introduced only as a means to cary out diff comparisons
and similar computations.
I had added this variation just to check compilation and
forgot to revert ist. Of course, we do *not* want to move
the inwards of our Mutator in the test. Rather, we want
to draw a copy from the mutated state
- we use a GenNode element
- this holds a polymorphic value known as DataCap
- besides simple attribute values, this may hold collections of GenNode sub elements
- a special kind of GenNode collection, the Record, is used to represent objects
The purpose of this setup is to enable an external model representation
which is only loosely coupled to the interndal data representation
through the exchange of (tree)diff messages
