Rest of comments on chapter 1 of the draft document

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

Comments on the 20 Oct 1987 16:34 draft of the CLOS documentation
pages 1-33 through 1-39.


1-33 second bullet: "It is not allowed" is not defined
in the error terminology section.  I think you mean "CLOS may be
extended to cover make-instance of a standard-type class or inclusion of
a standard type class as a superclass of a class."
(same issue as 1-16).

1-33 second bullet second sentence: I would delete the word "user-defined",
as on p.1-16, or change it to "defclass-defined."

1-33 second bullet last sentence: Remove this, we finished figuring out
which CL types have corresponding classes.

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1-33 last bullet: Do generic-flet, generic-labels, generic-function, and
with-added-methods use standard-generic-function as the default class of
the generic function they define?  I think they do.

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1-33 last sentence: CLOS provides several predefined method combination
types, so I would change this sentence to refer to method combination
types in general not having their own meta-objects, rather than specifically
mentioning the standard method combination type.  But see open issue below.

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1-34 through 1-39: I had already reviewed this section before, but I
read it again carefully.  It's almost all okay.

1-35 second paragraph: Maybe "both purposes" would be better than
"more than one purpose", since "more than one" made me think there were
more than the two purposes listed and maybe I had missed something.

1-37 first line: I'd say "It is not recommended that :initform forms
or default value forms have side-effects other than creating new objects."
since some people consider allocating storage to be a side-effect.

1-39 last line: "approved" might be a better word than "validated", since
we are trying to imply that check-initargs would definitely not signal
an error for the default initialization arguments and therefore does
not need to see them.

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OPEN ISSUES:

1-33 last sentence: Just the other day I had to put a kludge into a
Flavors tool, instead of doing something elegant, due to the fact that
in Flavors there are no meta-objects for method-combination types.  In
this case, I wanted to know what the qualifiers for primary methods
were.  Perhaps when the meta-object protocol is a bit more clearly
defined, we can add meta-objects for method-combination types, so that a
method-combination type can specialize the behavior of more functions
than just compute-effective-method.

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TYPOS:

1-36 fifth paragraph second line: "to a produce a"

1-38 last bullet: The section name in the cross-reference is spelled slightly
differently here than on the previous page.