Some early comments on 88-003 (accessor methods)

[Gregor.pa@Xerox.COM]

    Date: Wed, 23 Mar 88 12:03 EST
    From: David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

    I don't understand why accessor methods are said to be created by
    an update-dependent method through a special deferred creation
    mechanism, rather than being created in the normal fashion as part
    of the macro expansion of defclass.  Earlier we said that there is
    no real difference between an automatically created accessor method
    and one that the user writes himself, and that both should run at
    the same speed.  Page 24 gives a reason (the class may not be fully
    defined) for delaying creating accessor methods, but this reason does
    not make any sense.  There is no such restriction for ordinary
    methods.

Right, accessor methods want to be added and removed by
initialize-instance and reinitialize-instance respectively.  The
specific bit of illogic which is responsible for this is the third
complete paragraph of page 24 which says:

  "These are generated by the update-dependent method on standard-class.
   It cannot be generated by initialize-instance since the class may not
   be fully defined when initialize-instance is called."

As you point out, a class does not need to be fully defined to define
methods on it.
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