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re: DEFMETHOD with no required args?



    Date: 18 Jul 89 03:42 PDT
    From: Dick Gabriel <RPG@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>

    The question appears to hinge on a judgement of the form that unless some
    particular feature has some ``reasonable use'' in a language, why permit
    the feature?  A generic function of 0 arguments is primarily useful for
    writing a program with a simple control structure based on the method
    combination type specified.

It seems pathological to me to have a generic function of zero required
arguments.  I would never have guessed that the spec would allow this.
It requires a degenerate case of the first stage of generic function
invocation, namely determining the ordered set of applicable methods.

The only use for this is, as you say, to get access to the method
combination facility without the method lookup facility.  I guess this
will make it easier for people to demonstrate how CLOS makes it possible
to write gratuitously confusing programs!
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