Associate one object with another: How?
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Is there any way to associate one object with another so it's aware of the existence of its associate and can communicate with it, or query it?
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@Deeeds What do you mean? Any object can interact with any other object if you mean things like get position, set position etc.
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@Aidan-Oxley I don't mean get, that's part of the process. I mean "associate" in the sense that any one of a group of objects associated with any other objects know what/who they're associated with.
Take, for example, if you're my friend. That's an association. When we walk down the street together, I can ask you about things within the context of knowing that association and that you're within earshot. All I need to do is know that you're within earshot and that you're associated with me in a manner appropriate to query you whenever I like, because we're friends.
Taken one step further, I don't need to know the person in front of me or behind me in a queue. I know they're there, and due to our shared idle nature and the context we're in, we're associated, providing the right relationship in which I don't need to know either person, but can turn to either and ask them to hold my bag, lend me a pen, tell me the time or otherwise assist in our shared plight.
In a normal coding and/or creative environment, there are parents and children in an object graph of some sort. In this structure there is no need to know the name or hold a reference to the parent or children, it's possible to simply crawl this relationship by virtue of the association that is parent and children of any object. Knowing this provides a lot of functional and conceptual freedom of construction, coordination and communication between entities.
There are no parent/child associations between objects in hyperPad.
And, after thinking there's no such thing as instancing or referencing in hyperPad, I've recently "discovered" the ability to "mirror", which seems to be referencing, one of the most important facilities of creation and editing within a digital environment.
So I'm wondering, despite there being no obvious parenting, are there any other forms of association within hyperPad that I'm yet to discover?
