Re: with-slots usage question

Quoting Miles Egan ([email protected]):
> 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.

Sure, so you end up with %name, %size, and %length.  And don't forget
the headache which results when you export these symbols, and the user
of your package already had a function, generic or not, with the same
name but different lambda list.

Adding a class name prefix mostly solves these issues.  Still it feels
like a workaround, not like a solution.  All in all I find CLOS quite
attractive, but these are the occasional reminders that it requires
careful interface design.

Look at they problem they had with CORBA IDL attributes in the Common
Lisp mapping.  IDL purposely distinguishes between attributes and
operations, since they map to different concepts in most languages.
Instead of putting them into different Lisp packages (like at:attribute
and op:operation), the designers of the IDL mapping chose to throw them
together into the operation package.  As a result, you cannot write
  (defclass corba-interface () ((attribute :accessor op:attribute)))
since op:attribute's lambda list needs to work for non-reader operations
too, and thus looks like (self &rest args).

That IDL-mapping problem is solvable using a simple DEFCLASS wrapper.
But then you end up wondering yourself why are typing
  ((blubba :initarg :blubba :accessor :blubba)
   (frobfrob :initarg :frobfrob :accessor :frobfrob)
   (blablabla :initarg :blablabla :accessor :blablabla))
all the time anyway, so you add yet another DEFCLASS wrapper.  Explain
that to a newbie.

I have seen Lisp code which marks all accessors with a Java-style GET-
prefix...   :ACCESSOR GET-ATTRIBUTE.  Ugly?  Perhaps.  But neither
suprising nor absurd, I believe.

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