[kanderso@dino: Re: Difficulty with lambda-list congruence... ]

[kanderso@DINO.BBN.COM]

The original version of this may not have gotten to the commonloops
list.  Sorry for any duplications.
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To: REEDER%kebc.icl.stc.co.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
cc: commonloops.pa%XEROX.COM%RELAY.CS.NET%NSFNET-RELAY.AC.UK@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk,
    mwr%kebc.icl.stc.co.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Difficulty with lambda-list congruence... 
In-reply-to: Your message of Fri, 16 Feb 90 11:44:03 +0000.
             <6650.9002161144@sparc4.kebc.icl.stc.co.uk> 
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 90 11:56:14 -0500
From: kanderso@dino

I recently had a similar experience converting a 130,000 line program
from AAAI PCL to Victoria day pcl.  The major problem was lambda list
congruency, which forced me to edit about 100 lines of software.

Occasionally in the old system, functions were used little more as a
hook.  Dispatch was only used on the first argument, and variants of
the argument lists had anywhere from 1 to 5 arguments.  I don't
consider this particularly good for long term maintenance of the
system.

I like to think of CLOS a Behavior oriented, rather than Object
oriented.  Thus a generic function is an interface to some behavior,
or relationship between objects, no one object is superior to the
other necessarily.

If you want the old behavior, you must now plan for it by providing
&rest and &key args.  A little more planning, may not be so bad, at
least for the systems i work on.

k
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