Tree::simple is a fully object-oriented implementation of a simple n-ary tree. it is built upon the concept of parent-child relationships, so therefore every tree::simple object has both a parent and a set of children (who themselves may have children, and so on). every tree::simple object also has siblings, as they are just the children of their immediate parent.

it can be used to model hierarchal information such as a file-system, the organizational structure of a company, an object inheritance hierarchy, versioned files from a version control system or even an abstract syntax tree for use in a parser. it makes no assumptions as to your intended usage, but instead simply provides the structure and means of accessing and traversing said structure.

this module uses exceptions and a minimal design by contract style. all method arguments are required unless specified in the documentation, if a required argument is not defined an exception will usually be thrown. many arguments are also required to be of a specific type, for instance the $parent argument to the constructor must be a tree::simple object or an object derived from tree::simple, otherwise an exception is thrown.