Re: with-slots usage question

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 10:15, Peter Seibel wrote:
> > I considered doing this, but I usually tend to use accessors like
> > class-field (message-subject, message-author, etc in macho, for
> > instance). Maybe this is bad form?
> 
> There's a school of thought (which I happen to subscribe to) that says
> it is bad form. If you name your accesors this way, then when you
> write subclasses the names expose what level of the class hierarchy
> the accessors were defined in:
> 
>   (defclass foo ()
>     ((x :accessor foo-x)))
> 
>   (defclass bar (foo)
>     ((y :accessor bar-y)))
> 
>   (let ((b (make-instance 'bar)))
>     (setf (foo-x b) 10)  ; ugly, I think
>     (setf (bar-y b) 20))
> 
> The other point--which is sort of theoretical--is that when you are
> defining an accessor you are really defining a generic function (and a
> method specialized on this class). And GF's should really be viewed as
> existing independently of classes, therefore should be named in
> class-neutral ways.

Really revealing my ignorance wrt CLOS here (I guess I should actually
*read* the Keene book I've had on my shelf for years now), but isn't it
a problem if you try to define a generic function if there's already a
regular function by that name?  The reason I've been prepending the
base-class name to my accessor functions is that I've been worried about
defining functions like name, size, length, etc.

-- 
Miles Egan <[email protected]>

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