Fully general cell references

[Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@xxxxxx>]

Design problem:

   I need to be able to have ANY cell refer to ANY OTHER cell in the
   structure, including individual clones and including all cells
   participating in this referencing.
   
I have not been able to design such a structure using any bounded number
of dimensions.  However, the following solution seems to work:

Possible solution:

   Reserve a countably infinite set of dimensions for this purpose
   (such as d.cell-reference-1, d.cell-reference-2, ...).  Define that
   cell A refers to cell B if and only if B is A's positive neighbour
   on at least one of these dimensions.

I believe this solution works, but I'm not sure how using an unbounded
number of dimensions scales up.  For example, deciding whether a cell
refers to another cell would probably be O(n) (n being the number of
active reference dimensions), which is not nice.

Comments?

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