Re: proposed syntactic cleanups in defmethod

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

    Date: 26 Aug 87 19:15 PDT
    From: Gregor.pa@Xerox.COM

    I would like there to be a simple, clean story which can be used to
    correspondence between any given defmethod form, and a call to
    add-method, make-instance and ensure-generic-function.  Thats what makes
    defmethod nice syntax for add-method the same way defun is nice syntax
    for setf of symbol-function.

I agree that this is desirable.  I don't think the changes I proposed make
the story more or less complicated than it was before.  For example,
evaluating the specification of an individual rather than quoting it only
shows up as evaluating or quoting a particular position in the form resulting
from expansion of defmethod, I would expect.

Since I'm not sure I understand how these meta-level functions are intended
to be used, and since I have never seen the simple clean story written down,
I don't think I am competent to write out the details of how the expansion
of defmethod would be affected by my proposed changes.  Gregor, perhaps you
could take a crack at it?