Re: ---

[Gregor Kiczales <Gregor.pa@Xerox.COM>]

    From: Carnese@SRI-KL.ARPA

    True enough -- renaming classes which do not add any new operations
is no
    problem.  But I hope you're not arguing that making it more
difficult to
    rename the rest of the classes is not that bad.  Moving operations
around
    a class hierarchy is critical to deriving appropriate protocols.

Renaming classes, whether they add new operations or not, causes no
problems with this conc-name convention.  But renaming classes can cause
lots of other problems.  What about all the defmeth (or defmethod or
whatever) forms which mention the name of that class?  Some programming
environments are able to find all those method definitions and update
them, but in other environments the progarmmer will have to do a lot of
work to properly update each place which mentioned the name of the
class.

I also don't see what moving methods around in a class lattice has to do
with this conc-name convention.

It seems to me that the problems with both renaming classes and moving
methods are problems with having the environment understand what you are
doing.  The environment must have some knowledge of what classes and
methods really are.  I can't resist saying that the best way for the
environment to represent this meta-level information is to have the
classes and methods themselves be objects as they are in CommonLoops.