find my slot

[Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>]

re: As an aside, I think we should add FIND-SLOT-DEFINITION.  Sure, it is
    simple to write, but so is UNION.  Also, I think it and FIND-METHOD
    should be/remain generic.  As David pointed out, this makes it possible
    to have them be more efficient in certain cases, which is, I believe,
    not negligible.

I'm willing to buy Dave's argument that F-S-D isn't very important from 
a language point of view.  The one observation I could make is that since 
Lucid's implementation has almost exactly that functionality inside it 
internally -- and it is noticeably more efficient, mostly in terms of 
"footprint" of code -- then why not let the user have access to this one-
liner rather than haveing to reproduce it himself (and probably getting 
it wrong the first time!).  But I'm not seriously concerned about it.

Incidentally, a revised version of CLOS documentation might do a better
job of shifting to the MOP chapters the functions that a vanilla user
will probably never use.  ADD-METHOD, FIND-METHOD, etc come to mind.
But note: ALLOCATE-INSTANCE *doesn't* come to mind in this regard;
copping an "uninitialized" instance isn't just MOP'ping, but it is
usually "wizarding" (like, methods for MAKE-LOAD-FORM, which surely 
is basic rather than meta).



-- JonL --