Chapter 3 and the Cambridge Meeting

[Dick Gabriel <RPG@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>]

Here is a brief summary of what I think are the important points
of my feelings about chapter 3, some of which were expressed poorly
in Cambridge last month:

1. I believe a specification that is mute on the topics covered in
chapter 3 is not acceptable.

2. I believe that the material that Danny and Gregor put together for our
meeting is acceptable (with the problems we discussed in Cambridge
resolved) if there is a careful statement about what degree of alterations
the meta-object procotol is able to achieve. I think we saw enough
variations on object-oriented programming in Cambridge to see that it is
possibly unrealistic to expect to completely parameterize the meta-object
level while achieving expressibility of (possibly unforseen)
optimizations.

However, there is a degree of variability that we can achieve with the
current level of protocol, which I believe is necessary to present.

3. I want to make sure that we have a reasonable version of chapters 1 and
2 to present to X3J13 for the next meeting, which is why I insisted we
spend the 3 hours getting it out of the way in Cambridge before the
Chapter 3 discussion. I expect to have Moon's comments incorporated into
Chapter 1 by the end of mext week (2 writing projects are ahead of it on
the queue), and I will place it out on SAIL at that time.

4. I liked Danny and Gregor's proposed new outline reasonably well. My
only question was whether some of the class-centered operations really
were class-specific or could be generalized to instances - for example,
propagate-class-update and update-class-locally.  I would also favor
a reduced-ambition proposal that only revealed some important parts of
the mechanism.

			-rpg-