MOP Goals

[kempf%hplabsz@hplabs.HP.COM]

As a result of last week's meeting, would it be possible to consider revising 
the goals of the MOP in the direction of more modesty? 

As was discussed, the MOP faces the twin dangers of tying the CLOS
implementor's hands (making it difficult to provide a high performance
implementation by opening the kernel up too far) and not providing enough
functionality for extending CLOS in radically different directions.

For the next five years or so, the most likely uses of the MOP seem to
be as hooks for program development environments and modest extensions
of CLOS (persistence, frame-based languages). Perhaps, if we focused on
those, we could achieve a useful standard, which would still allow research
into how metaclass programming should be done.

		jak