Re: Questions about reflective operations on functions and methods

[stodghil@cs.cornell.edu (Paul Stodghill)]

> That's a good question.  It may be that, lacking any intercessory capability,
> these functions aren't terribly useful.  I can imagine APPLICABLE-METHOD?
> being useful as a sort of safety check, even without a full meta-object
> protocol.  It's harder for me to see how SORTED-APPLICABLE-METHODS would
> be useful, except perhaps by the programming environment.

> Opinions?

Yes. But first a question: how concerned are you about the efficiency of
compiler generated code? If this is a concern, then I'm not sure that you
want the language to be too reflective, certainly not in a destructive
manner. If compiler-issues are not high priority, then go ahead and make
the language competely reflective. Could be way cool. For instance, hygenic
macros would be easy to implement if the user could add methods to EVAL.

>   -Andrew