Use params as a StringToStringMap for additional parameters?

[Adda0]

We continue to use params as StringToStringMap for additional parameters for now, but we should reconsider our options and decide whether we might want to go for another approach of setting additional parameters for certain operations.

The alternative could be:

• global configuration file,
• global configuration class,
• configuration class passed as an argument to the operations,
• hierarchy of configuration classes, and optionally ad-hoc additional parameters specified by passed params argument, or
• some other approach; remains to be suggested.

[Adda0]

An option suggested by @tfiedor is the following:

I think the configuration (dictionary with params), while on one hand is quite versatile, it is also quite error prone and inellegant. Maybe we could consider some different way. Maybe some singleton class Configuration? And instead of

determinize(aut, {"algorithm": "classic", "minimize": True});

We could write something like:

Config.DeteminizationAlgorithm = Determinization.Classic;
Config.MinimizeAfterDeterminization = true;
determinize(aut);

It is longer, but maybe more manageble, less error-prone (debuging "minimize": "treu" could be hell).

[martinhruska]

When I see the two versions together here I prefer the original StringToStringMap. It's dynamic, flexible, extendable. I wouldn't prefere global config, at least until we have a CLI. Then it would make sense since we set Config during parsing CLI params. I would consider a common store of predefined default StringToStringMap for different algorithms where the possible options would be documented.

[Adda0]

Discuss interface for reduce, raised by @ondrik in #406 (comment).