Re: draft on inheritance of slots and defclass options

[Sonya E. Keene <skeene@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: 15 Jan 87 16:00 PST
    From: Masinter.pa@Xerox.COM

Thanks for replying so quickly.   This morning I made most of the 
changes you suggested, and will write out the concepts file today. 

    I liked the phrasing 
    "In general, xs are inherited by subclasses; that is, ..."

    You used it 

    "Methods are inherited by subclasses.   That is, a method provided by a
    class is applicable ..."

    I'd like it

    INHERITANCE OF SLOTS

    In general, slots are inherited by subclasses. That is, slots defined in
    a class are usually  also slots in any subclass of that class. The
    inheritance of slots depends on ....

I made this wording change.    

    - - - - - - - -
    I was confused by the organization of defclass options because the
    initial set of options were really slot options within a defclass rather
    than defclass options. 

Right, I forgot to put in a subheading called "Inheritance of 
DEFCLASS Slot-options".     That header makes the organization much clearer.
The subsection "Inheritance of DEFCLASS Options" is divided into two
pieces:   one for the slot-options and one for the class-options.   

    I see no advantage in spelling out :READER -- ... ;see :ACCESSOR instead
    of saying 
    :ACCESSOR, :READER -- These options are not inherited; that is,
    subclasses do not ... 

I could do it that way, but I prefer to list each option separately.   If the
reader-person wanted to find out how the :READER option was inherited, it's
easier to find it if each option is separated out from the text.   Also,
the way I did it, I can refer to the :ACCESSOR slot-option in the text for the
:READER-PREFIX and :ACCESSOR-PREFIX class-options, rather than repeating that
paragraph again in the class-options part.   

    -----

    Your section says EXAMPLES OF INHERITANCE yet it is a single example.
    Rather than packing them all into a single example, it would be much
    clearer to give separate examples.

You could call it a single example, but it illustrates many of the
inheritance concepts.     One advantage of the way its done now is brevity
(not usually my strong point as a writer), so I hesitate to make this 
section even longer.   But I'll play around with separating each concept
into its own example and see if that works better.