Re: Questions about reflective operations on functions and methods

[alms@cambridge.apple.com]

> > 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.

Our goal for Dylan is not to produce a research language, but to produce
a language which can be used to deliver commercial quality applications.
We've had to moderate reflective operations to achieve this goal.

> 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.

I don't expect that we'll be going in this direction.  We'd certainly encourage
anyone who wants to do research on extending Dylan in these directions, though.

  -Andrew