Query on ISSUE: LOAD-OBJECTS

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

    Date: Wed, 25 Oct 89 07:56:12 PDT
    From: Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>

    It says somewhere in this proposal:

      MAKE-LOAD-FORM of an object of * metaclass STANDARD-CLASS or
      STRUCTURE-CLASS for which no user-defined method is applicable signals
      an error.  

    Surely this can't mean "user-defined", since that would effectively prohibit
    an implementation from using STANDARD-OBJECTs for internal purposes.

At the asterisk above I would insert "user-defined class and".

    Perhaps
    the next sentence in that paragraph is all that is really needed:

      It is valid to implement this [default error-signaling behaviour] either 
      by defining default methods on STANDARD-OBJECT and STRUCTURE-OBJECT that 
      signal an error or by having no applicable method for those classes.

    with the implication that user-defined classes of metaclass either
    STANDARD-CLASS or STRUCTURE-CLASS will see no other system-provided 
    methods on MAKE-LOAD-FORM.

Yes, the idea was that user-defined objects would not inherit a method that
would do something they didn't want.

I don't know whether MAKE-LOAD-FORM has been put into the specification
yet.  Perhaps the best way to address this issue would be to make the
writeup for MAKE-LOAD-FORM speak about conforming programs, rather than
about implementations.  Then it wouldn't accidentally imply anything about
what implementations can and cannot do with their own internal objects.