Consider moving Communicator to a superclass of Model. about cyclus HOT 2 CLOSED

I think it's important to remember that while converters are the only model that doesn't currently inherit Communicator, this may not always be the case, and when Cyclus was first envisioned, other motivators for this flexibility were conceivable.

For example, other developers may want to introduce non-communicator models in the future to facilitate sub-process modelling. That is, there has been some discussion between myself and paul concerning a really non-market-interacting sub-process model flexibility. Some potential collaborators have been interested in our ability to facilitate the development of processes that have distinct subparts and myriad intermediate material states internally. This can be achieved at the moment by a long train of sub-process level "facilities" in series, but in the long term there may be interest in something more market-independent... and this may be in the form of non-communicating models.

from cyclus.

Those are good points Katy. If we made this change, a developer could make a module that inherits from Model (and whence it would be a communicator) but just ignore the communicator interface provided. It could have an exception throwing receiveMessage method for instance. This issue is an 'investigate' issue (as labeled) - and I do not intend to do anything rash - just to investigate.

from cyclus.