RefAtomReferences

Atom references are a facility implemented on top of the regular HyperGraph typing framework. The easiest way to think about them, if you are familiar with C++ techniques of memory management, is as “smart pointers”. Atom references are simply values that refer to HyperGraph atoms. One can create an atom whose value is an atom reference, or one can have the value along some dimension of a composite type (e.g. a record slot) be an atom reference. In fact, the main motivation for creating atom references was the ability to create aggregate structures of HyperGraph atoms in analogous way to many OO programming languages.