Re: with-slots usage question

>>>>> "Nikodemus" == Nikodemus Siivola <[email protected]> writes:

    Nikodemus> On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 02:15:37PM -0600, Robert P. Goldman wrote:
    >> I feel awfully stupid asking this, but....  Can't you just shadow
    >> LENGTH and STRING in your package if you want to override them?

    Nikodemus> "Yes, but I don't want to."

    >> So I can make a generic function for LENGTH that has as its default
    >> method (for type T) COMMON-LISP:LENGTH, and put whatever other methods
    >> I want for it.  Yes?

    Nikodemus> This I had not actually thought of. 

    Nikodemus> I like the idea in essence, but have the feeling that
    Nikodemus> this is asking for trouble.

    Nikodemus> In the very least, STRING is also a type specifier, so
    Nikodemus> the amount of hair is greater then just shadow +
    Nikodemus> defgeneric. (Applies to VECTOR, ARRAY, etc. as well.)

Yes, that's why I said I liked the idea of interfaces instead of
packages.  I think there's been a good big rant about packages that
said about all there was to be said, by Richard O'Keefe, in the
context of prolog.

However, I think we're stuck with them.  There's locales, of course,
but I'd rather have something my compiler groks.

    Nikodemus> Fortune favors the bold, though, so I've adopted this
    Nikodemus> in Linedit in spirit of experimentation. Upsides of
    Nikodemus> tiny codebase and utterly non-critical application. ;)

I've actually done this in the context of a small module in a very
large running system, and it worked ok.  But I didn't shadow any of
the function names that were also datatypes...

I suppose one could do something weird where one shadowed a symbol, to
cover up its function definition, and then used some heinous setting
to get the variable interpretation.  It occurs to me that I don't know
how the typing stuff is associated with symbols.  I'll take a look
tonight when time permits...

Cheers,
R