| A NodeContract establishes what sorts of values can be stored
in a node in the registry. The contract is set at node creation time, and
does not change during the node's lifecycle. (But, from the consumer's
point of view, the node instance at a particular path may change,
and bring with it a new contract.)
Also, contracts are comparable, so that the consumer of node data can
provide a contract... if the consumer's contract is equal to, or a subset
of, the node's contract, then the consumer is happy. In other words, the
consumer wants to know that there is no value that will pass the node's
contract, but not the consumer's contract.
author: ;Rob Clark;a0873619;San Diego;; version: 0.1 |