A Particle is a little package that contains data; they represent the principal communication technique that blocks use to pass results around. They move through PortHoles and Geodesics; they are allocated in pools called Plasmas. The class Particle is an abstract base class; all real Particle objects are really of some derived type. All Particles contain a link field that allows queues and stacks of Particles to be manipulated efficiently (class ParticleStack is a base class for everything that does this). Particles also contain virtual operators for loading and accessing the data in various forms; these functions permit automatic type conversion to be easily performed.
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