Re: Reinitialization

[Sonya E. Keene <skeene@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

This message suggests some better names.

I'm willing to take a shot at putting this new material into Chapters 1
and 2.  

    Date: Wed, 20 Apr 88 23:51 EDT
    From: David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

    This message comments on the proposed revamping of the ch1 object
    creation protocol in support of ch3.

	Date: 13 Apr 88 11:15 PDT
	From: Danny Bobrow <Bobrow.pa@Xerox.COM>

	The four updating functions are:

	initialize-new-instance instance &rest initialization-arguments
	reinitialize-instance instance &rest initialization-arguments
	update-instance-structure instance added-slots discarded-slots property-list
	     &rest initialization-arguments
	update-instance-with-new-class previous current 
	   &rest initialization-arguments

    This suggests renaming update-instance-structure to
    update-instance-with-redefined-class.  With that change all five
    names look consistent and fairly clear as to their meanings.

Suggestion 1 (to be superseded below by Suggestion 2):

How about these two names instead of "-with-new-class" and
"-with-redefined-class"?   "With" seems overloaded, and this use of it
is inconsistent with "with-open-file", etc.   Also, "new class" is
overloaded; it means both "newly-created class" and "different class". 

  update-instance-structure-for-different-class
  update-instance-structure-for-redefined-class

Suggestion 2   (this one I prefer):

Let's get rid of the "-structure" from these names, and use the
following names:

  update-instance-for-different-class
  update-instance-for-redefined-class

Why?  Well, take a look at pages 1-15 and 1-16.   The chapter on
Redefining Classes explains that this is a two-step process.  Step 1 is
"Modifying the Structure of Instances", which is done by an un-named
process.    Step 2 is called "Initializing Newly-added Local Slots",
which is done by the generic function currently called
update-instance-structure.    Thus update-instance-structure has nothing
to do with updating the instance structure, because it is called AFTER
the instance structure has been updated.

Just plain update-instance-for-different-class and
update-instance-for-redefined-class seem to describe what they actually
do, where "update-instance-" is shorthand for "update the appropriate
slots of the instance to have the correct values".