Comments on comments on Chapter 1

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

    Date: Thu, 22 Oct 87 14:15:21 PDT
    From: Pavel.pa@Xerox.COM

	    1-3 sixth paragraph: "ordered set" should be "list" in two places,
	    to avoid implying that duplicates are eliminated from the "set" of
	    parameter specializers or the "set" of qualifiers.

	    1-23 first paragraph under Introduction to Methods: same comment.

    I would rather that the word used here was "sequence" instead of "list",
    just because "sequence" is a bit less evocative of a particular Lisp
    data structure.

Good idea.  I like "ordered sequence" here.

    Perhaps I'm just missing something, but what's the use of multiple
    :default-initargs options?

defclass' philosophy appears to be to allow all options and slot options
to appear multiple times unless repetition has to be forbidden because
it would be meaningless.  I think multiple :default-initargs options
just act like they were concatenated.

    So, to test my understanding, "(EQL -form-)" is a parameter specializer
    name and "(EQL -object-)" is the resulting parameter specializer, where
    -object- is the result of evaluating -form-.  Is this right?

Right.  At Dick's request I mailed him a rewrite of this portion of this
section that I think should clarify everything better than my comment.

    Moon says: ....
    I agree with this.  I was surprised when I saw that LIST was more
    specific than SYMBOL.

Thank you.

    [name of] Standard Method Combination

    Rather than add one more symbol in the LISP package that has no
    intrinsic meaning (e.g., no value), I would like to see this named
    :STANDARD.  The only reason the various other built-in m-c types aren't
    named with keywords is to make their association with the Lisp operators
    clear.

I don't understand what you mean by "intrinsic meaning".  Binding to
a method-combination type is as intrinsic as binding to a value in my book.
However, I have no objection to using a keyword as the name, other than
that we'll have to change the second sentence under Arguments on page 2-29
slightly.