Re: Best of all worlds, tools in the toolbox, etc.

[Scott McKay <address@hidden>]

At 04:23 PM 11/27/01, Dan Weinreb wrote:

>Several serious and practical object-oriented language facilities were
>added to Lisp as libraries (libraries not only of functions but also
>of macros).  It was actually possible to get very far without any
>modifications whatsoever to the underlying interpreter or compiler,
>and still get very practical performance.  (In fact, does anybody
>remember to what extent the late-model CLOS implementation *did*
>include changes that were so deep that you couldn't do them as part of
>a library?  I don't remember any more.)

Gregor's implementation of PCL ("Portable Common Loops") had very
acceptable performance and was completely done as an add-on.  It
was completely contemporaneous with Genera's CLOS implementation.

It's possible that 'with-slots' needed special support -- either a code-
walker or 'symbol-macrolet'.  I think that this special support gives a clue
that 'with-slots' wasn't such a great idea...