Re: Naming

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

    Date: 4 Feb 88 16:53 PST
    From: Danny Bobrow <Bobrow.pa@Xerox.COM>

	We need to decide by the end of the weekend what to do about
	naming. I strongly hesitate to make the change (if it can be said
	that one can strongly hesitate). If we make the change I prefer the
	terms NAME-<word> over SYMBOL-<word>. I worry that we will make an
	ugly mistake in doing this.

    To avoid such ugliness, let us leave symbol-class and (setf symbol-class) with a
    restriction to symbols.    

    However, let us take out any restriction about what can be stored/returned from
    class-name.  Then the dynamic-class hack can work using its own class lookup
    mechanism, and class-name can contain the hint about what the class is.  

Yes.  Only a symbol can be a proper name, and non-symbol values for
class-name are only hints.  In a discussion last fall (I think), we had
already decided that class-name was a hint, and wasn't necessarily
always the proper name.

What Danny is proposing here is what I thought all along I was
proposing, however I was too distracted to produce a coherent wording.
I apologize for the digression, and thank Danny for bringing us back to
earth.  I never meant to propose some elaborate new naming scheme, only
to propose that the hints returned by class-name need not be symbols.

By the way, I don't think this is a change.  I think class-name was not
restricted in type up until recently when as a side-effect of making the
document clearer and more specific, a type restriction was put in by
accident.  So we're just saying that that was an accident, rather than
an intention, and hence should be undone before publication.