Re: Continuing comments on Draft 11

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

The stuff you sent back was so implementation specific that I am not
sure I understood it.  Let me try to propose something like what you
are suggesting.

Add a new lexical function to the body of methods, this lexical function
can be used to access the value passed in as the second argument when a
method function is called.

Add a second returned value from make-method-lambda.  This value is a
symbol which describes what the method expects to find in the second
argument to method functions.

But, what does this get me?  How can I extend the space of what the
second argument/value are for.  Because the second value returned by
make-method-lambda is a symbol, and it disappears into the bowels of
the implementation, I can't use OOP to tailor what it means.

I actually don't think that extending the space of what dynamic
information can be passed into a method is going to be tractable given
the current MOP.  It depends on a lot of stuff.  For example, I think
you would want to attach to compute-applicable-xxx, otherwise you
wouldn't have a basis for caching.