...but not yet switched into the main LocationQuery interface,
because that would also break the existing implementation;
recasting this implementation is the next step to do....
NOTE it just type checks right now,
but since meta programming is functional programming, this means
with >90% probability that it might actually work this way....
...which also happens to include sibling and child iteration;
this is an attempt to reconcile the inner contradictions of the design
(we need both absolute flexibility for the type of each child level iterator
yet we want just a single, generic iterator front-end)
...this was a difficult piece of consideration and analysis.
In the end I've settled down on a compromise solution,
with the potential to be extended into the right direction eventually...
This can be seen as a side track, but the hope is
by relying on some kind of monadic evaluation pattern, we'll be
able to to reconcile the IterExplorer draft from 2012 with the requirement
to keep the implementation of "tree position" entirely opaque.
The latter is mandatory in the use case here, since we must not intermingle
the algorithm to resolve UI-coordinates in any way with the code actually
navigating and accessing GTK widgets. Thus, we're forced to build some kind
of abstraction barrier, and this turns out to be surprisingly difficult.
the intention is to rely solely upon this abstract interface
in order to navigate the structure of the actual UI, so the
resolution process remains decoupled from the technicalities
of the actual UI toolkit set.
Through implementation of the corresponding unit test we'll determine
what it actually takes to build such a path resolution algorithm...
obviously, we get a trivial case, when the path is explicit,
and we need a tricky full blown resolution with backtracking
when forced to interpolate wildcards to cover a given UICoord
spec against the actual UI topology.
Do we need it?
* actually not right now
* but already a complete implementation of the ViewSpec concept
requires such a resolution
After completing the self-contained UICoord data elements,
the next thing to consider might be how to resolve UI coordinates
against an actual window topology. We need to define a suitable
command-and-query interface in order to build and verify this
intricate resolution process separated from the actual UI code.