Excessive Calls to parameter.__getattr__

[SamKG]

From profiling psyneulink code, I found that parameter.__getattr__ was called many times.

For example, in the following code:
from psyneulink.core.components import component

There were about 300,000 calls to parameter.__getattr__.

In addition, creating components in psyneulink seems to also increase the number of calls to
parameter.__getattr__, up to the order of millions of calls.

Testing shows that these calls represent atleast 40% (if not more) of the total time spent when creating nodes and importing psyneulink.

These counts seem a bit excessive; I'm wondering if there may be a bug buried deep in the parameters class - or potential for significant optimization.

[SamKG]

As discussed in today's meeting, it may be beneficial to refactor the parameter class in its entirety, so that it exists as essentially a wrapper around ctype objects.
This could potentially be more efficient, and also has the added benefit of solving synchronization between compiled psyneulink and python psyneulink.

[SamKG]

Fixed in #1605