Re: Assigning default slot value plus side effects?

[kanderso@DINO.BBN.COM]

  Redistributed: CommonLoops.PA
  Date: Fri, 13 Jul 90 09:41:10 EDT
  From: Marty Hall <hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>
  X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (6.1 4/26/88)
  To: CommonLoops.PA@xerox.com
  Subject: Re: Assigning default slot value plus side effects?
  
  I had an application where, there were side effects that needed to occur 
  for all values in a certain slot of a class of objects. I noted that
  it was obvious how to do this for changed values, by attaching a :after
  method to (setf <accessor>) on the slot, but that I couldn't find a way
  to make use of default values this way, because initialize-instance
  uses slot-value (not the accessors) for putting values in slots.
  Of course, I could write my own initialization function that initializes
  the object then puts in the values using the accessors, but (being new
  to clos), I wondered if I had overlooked something clean way of doing it.
  
  Peter Saurugger responded that he didn't think there was any clean
  approach, and went on to say:
  > 
  > While the X3JI3 Specs mention the possibility of adding to the existing
  > initialization-protocol, the behaviour you describe does not seem to be
  > mentioned in this document.
  > 
  > I agree very strongly with you that on initialization I would expect the
  > same behaviour as when updating a slot. I do not know whether these specs 
  > still can be amended, but if there is no major reason against this, why 
  > not "vote" on the possibility of an amendment to the behaviour of 
  > shared-initialize ?
  
  How does one "vote"?  Also, does anyone know the motivation of X3J13 for
  using slot-value instead of the accessors for initialization? Is there
  a big efficiency win there?

I don't know what all the motivation is, but i can think of 2 reasons
for using SLOT-VALUE:

1.  Not all slots have accessors, but every slot can be SLOT-VALUE'd.

2.  It is certainly much faster to fill the slot, than it its to run
the SETF method.  Since in most cases, the setf method simply fills
the slot every MAKE-INSTANCE would be needlessly slowed down.

I vote for using SLOT-VALUE and i'll do the extra work when i need to.
MAKE-INSTANCE is already slow enough.

The way i usually do this is to put an AFTER method on
INITIALIZE-INSTANCE that does the (SETF <ACCESSOR>).  If you really
want this for every slot of every class you make, you can write your
own metaclass to do SHARED-INITIALIZE using (SETF <ACCESSOR>) for the
slots that have accessors.

k