SpecTcl supports a rich set of conditions that can be combined in arbitrary ways and then used to conditionalize spectrum increments. The spectcl.gates type encapsulates these gates. You can wrap an existing gate, create new gates and, once you have a gate wrapping you can modify the gate itself.
Getters allow readonly access to gate attributes.
Before providing reference material, it's important to understand how gates are stored in SpecTcl in a manner that maintains a coherent view to all clients in an inexpensive manner. Gates are a two part object. Firstly, there's the gate itself, which can be any of a number of differnt types of gate. Next there's a gate container that has the gate name and a pointer to the gate itself.
When a gate is modified, its container is unmodified but the gate the container holds changes. This implies that if you have a handle (pointer) to the gate container, the definition of the gate can change out from underneath you without requiring any action to update your idea of the gate.
This is analagous to the way in which tree parameters map several parameters with the same name to the same underlying set of metadata and same parameter.
spectcl.gates objects, therefore don't directly wrap gates but, instead wrap a gate container object. Thus if the gate is modified (even if the type of gate is changed), the object is updated without requiring any action on the part of the wrapper or you. Similarly, several objects can be instantiated that wrap the same gate (container) and all will maintain a consistent view of the actual gate through their handles to its gate container.