Two questions and two comments

[macgreg@vaxa.isi.edu]

Sometimes I find myself holding onto a class object and wanting to know
the value of one of its class variables.  Does/will CLOS provide a way
to access class variables other than via class instances (sometimes I
haven't yet allocated any instances when I need the value)?

Comment: For the sake of uniformity, I would vote that initforms of
class variables be evaluated just as they are for instance variables --
I get temporarily tripped-up every so often by the inconsistency in the
syntax.

Second question:  The "add-named-class" function allows us to create a
class "on-the-fly" without having to use "eval".  Is there a similar
construct for creating methods at run time (i.e., will it be
advertised)?  PCL obviously has such a function, since methods can be
created as a side-effect of calling "add-named-class".  By the way,
is "add-name-class" part of CLOS, or just a PCL feature?

Suggestion:  I did some timings on compiled segments of CLOS code (on a
Symbolics), and found that a slot access is 20 times faster if a
"with-slots" is declared with :use-accessors = nil than if the slot is
accessed with the ordinary syntax (and its 30 times faster than a
"slot-value" form).  So, there is great incentive to place "with-slots"
declarations everywhere.  I've invented a "let-slots" macro which
expands to a "let" statement with a "with-slots" inside of it, which
looks much more attractive than having to declare both statements.  My
suggestion is to put something equivalent to "let-slots" into CLOS.