Best python way to do 'object messaging'

[Philip Swartzleonard]

Ok, so i have this pre-prototype (embrionic? :) game system, rogueish, 
that  basically involves a bunch of different objects running around a 
map, containing each other, beating each other up, that kind of thing 
:). What i'm trying to do is set up a general purpouse system for 
passing messages between the interface, the objects, the AI's, the game 
world and timing system, and whatever else comes up. Here are my current 
ideas/contarints:

1. Basic interface: anything that can accept a message has a .message
(msg) function attaced to it. If the player hits a critter, some part of 
the player (i have the body and control seperated) sends the body of the 
critter a damage/type/amount/source type message.

2. It has to be able to be passed easily through various receptor 
objects that don't really care about what the message is. For example, i 
do something along the lines of 'map.messageradius( 
msg,x,y,radius,inv_arsqrd(1.2) ), which only affects a 'percentage of 
effect' segment of the message while distrubiting it to all of the 
affected cells, which do nothing but ditrubite it to whatever objects or 
creatures happen to be standing there. 

3. It has to be storable. My idea for a global timekeeping system is 
something that stores messages to send to objects at various times. For 
example, an AI object would always set a ai-tick message to itself at 
some time in the future at the end of its run, and this is the way that 
I would get keep 'live' objects updated properly.

I am currently thinking of representing the message as an object with 
various properties, and having each object that recieves one switch on 
the type of message, or even better, have a routine in a base class that 
takes some element of the message object, does a little string mangling, 
and calls a 'Rec<MESSAGETYPE>(message)' function similar to how TADS 
uses the VerDoXXX, VerIoXXXWith kind of functions for dealing with verbs 
(if anyone knows enough about TADS to understand this analogy ... it's 
one of my favorite languages :).

This is -probably- what i'm going to go with, but i'd like to see if 
anyone has any ideas/comments/insperations/pointers-to-relevant-
information, because i've never really made a system like this in any 
language, and i'd like to get it right before i build most of the rest 
of the system over it (i alredy have to refactor(i think that's how you 
use it) all of my display stuff out of the game data stuff, and remake 
the resource system -again- :)

Thanks for anything :)

-- 
Philip Sw "Starweaver" [rasx] :: www.rubydragon.com