Usability: Segments that can't have children raise NoMethodError

[untoldone]

While segments with children respond to :children, segments (such as MSH) do not. This seemed to not match my abstraction usability expectation. With the current implementation, I'll have to write code to detect if Segment has a child or not rather than just getting no children.

I do see that there is a :has_children? method which helps, but it just feels off to have to call a method like this to prevent this type of StandardError.

[mogox]

I agree this is an issue, I've seen it more than a few times, we probably want to fix this in a major release.
I think the solution is always have children and treat it as an empty collection for segments which do not have one. I believe this would be change that will break compatibility for those who depend on the method children being only available for segments with children.

What do you think @Stratus3D ?

[untoldone]

One thought: You could always add another method in addition to children to avoid the reverse compat issue and depreciate children.

[mogox]

That's an excellent idea @untoldone. Thanks!