Re: user interface macros

[Gregor J. Kiczales <gregor@parc.xerox.com>]

Just to comment quickly on this one little issue:

    Date: Mon, 7 May 90 10:46:44 PDT
    From: David Gray <gray@lucid.com>

    > To be specific, I think what you want to do about DEFCLASS is to define
    > precisely how each of the standard options is passed through, and not to
    > define at all whether and how nonstandard options are passed through,
    > other than to mention that nonstandard options might be present and to
    > discuss the naming restrictions (packages).

    That would be sufficient for implementation-defined options, but
    non-standard options should also include user-defined options.  In order
    for the metaclass writer to be able to define new options, there needs to
    be a standard correspondence between the DEFCLASS form and the arguments to
    ENSURE-CLASS-USING-CLASS.

I agree with David (Gray) that we need to do a little more than what
David (Moon) suggests.  My proposal (admittedely cluttered by typos)
was to specify a minimal, simple behavior for DEFCLASS and DEFGENERIC
processing of non-standard options.  Enough to get some power out of
it, but by no means fully featured.  We would also say explictly that
an implementations are free to extend or modify this behavior.

Single appearance options which simply quote their value would be
supported by the minimal, specified behavior.  For anything else you
would need to use your own macro or implementation-specific tools.  I
believe This will get enough more than saying nothing about how
non-standard options are passed through that it is worth doing.