Re: new PCL; when?

[Gregor.pa@Xerox.COM]

We are actively working on the new release now.  It should be out within
a few days since we plan to call it Passover PCL.  The following excerpt
from the new notes.text file may be useful to you as well, it describes
some of the changes that will be in this release.



- In the last release there was an implementation of the specified CLOS
initialization protocol.  This implementation had the correct behavior,
but some of the generic functions had temporary names (*make-instance,
*initialize-instance and *default-initargs).  This was done to give
people time to convert their code to the behavior of the new
initialization protocol.

In this release, all generic functions in the specified initialization
protocol have their proper names.  The implementation of the old,
obsolete initialization protocol has disappeared entirely.

The following renamings have happened:

  12/7/88 release                this release

  *make-instance                 make-instance
  *initialize-instance           initialize-instance
  *default-initargs              default-initargs

The functions shared-initialize and reinitialize-instance already had
the proper names.

The new initialization protocol is documented fully in the 88-002R
specification.

As part of this change, PCL now uses the new initialization protocol to
create metaobjects internally.  That is it calls make-instance to create
these metaobjects.  The actual initargs passed are not yet as specified,
that will be in a later release.

This is the largest change in this release.  If you have not already
started using the new initialization protocol (with the temporary *xxx
names) you are going to have to do so now.  In most cases, old methods
on the generic functions INITIALIZE, INITIALIZE-FROM-DEFAULTS and
INITIALIZE-FROM-INIT-PLIST must be substantially rewritten to convert
them to methods on INITIALIZE and SHARED-INITIALIZE.

- The following functions and macros have disappeared.  This table also
  show briefly what you use instead.

    DEFMETHOD-SETF               (use DEFMETHOD)
    RUN-SUPER                    (use CALL-NEXT-METHOD)
    OBSOLETE-WITH-SLOTS          (use WITH-SLOTS or WITH-ACCESSORS)
    SYMBOL-CLASS                 (use FIND-CLASS)
    CBOUNDP                      (use FIND-CLASS)
    CLASS-NAMED                  (use FIND-CLASS)
    GET-SETF-GENERIC-FUNCTION    (use GDEFINITION)

- In certain ports, method lookup will be faster because of a new scheme
to deal with interrupts and the cache code.  In other ports it will be
slightly slower.  In all ports, the cache code now interacts properly
with interrupts.

- DEFMETHOD should interact properly with TRACE, ADVISE etc. in most
ports.  two new port-specific functions (in defs.lisp) implement this.
These are unencapsulated-fdefinition and fdefine-carefully.  If this
doesn't work properly in your port, fix the definition of these
functions and send it back so it can be in the next release.

- This release runs in Golden Common Lisp version 3.0.

- Previously, the use of slot-value (or with-slots) in the body of a
method which had an illegal specializer gave strange errors.  Now it
gives a more reasonable error message.

- An annoying problem which caused KCL and friends to complain about
*exports* being unbound has been fixed.

- The walker has been modified to understand the ccl:%stack-block
special form in Coral Common Lisp.

- The use of defadvice in pre 3.0 releases has been fixed in Lucid Low.

- multiple-value-setq inside of with-slots now returns the correct
value.

- A minor bug having to do with macroexpansion environments and the KCL
walker has been fixed.

- A bug in the parsing of defmethod which caused only symbols (rather
than non-nil atoms) to be used as qualifiers.
-------