Re: STANDARD-TYPE-CLASS

[Gregor Kiczales <Gregor.pa@Xerox.COM>]

This message addresses this issue of what to name the class currently
named class, and related issues.

The current proposal seems to be:

There is a class named essential-class, the english phrase "X is a
class" corresponds to (typep X 'essential-class).  There is a class
named default-class, this is the kind of class defclass produces, it is
a subclass of essential-class.  There is a class named built-in-class,
it is a subclass of essential-class.

I basically agree with this.  But it seems to me that it might be a good
idea to use the name class instead of essential-class for the top of the
class hierarchy.  This would make the english phrase "X is a class"
correspond to (typep x 'class).  In addition, it would remove the use of
the somewhat confusing "ESSENTIAL-xxx" convention from the standard (I
confess that I use it all the time, but that doesn't mean that it isn't
confusing).

It seems to me that whatever convention we use here will be picked up by
a lot of other programs and programmers.  I think that means we should
actually have a convention, with a consistent set of rules which are
explained in the rationale section.