Making (CLASS-OF <class>) be EQ to <class>

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

    Date: Mon, 24 Sep 1990 23:38 EDT
    From: Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>
    ....
       This seems to
       point out a lacuna in CLOS as compared to flavors.   Didn't flavors
       used to have a thing called SEND-AS?  I know we had to put SEND-AS 
       and LEXPR-SEND-AS in that "EXTEND" object system of MacLisp/NIL back 
       in 1980 or 1981 in order for it to be able to emulate flavors.

One of the features of Flavors, when it was introduced in 1981, was the
elimination of SEND-AS.  I forget the names of the object systems that
preceded Flavors, but they all used SEND-AS as their approach to controlling
inheritance (this was borrowed from Smalltalk) and as a result were nearly
impossible to use.  Flavors used method combination instead of SEND-AS and
CLOS follows in that tradition.

The rest of your message is incomprehensible on first reading, having so
many layers of metaobjects, but I'll look at it later.  It might be that the
answer is simply that object-oriented programming is not a substitute for
figuring out what you want your program to be able to do and designing it
accordingly.