A MOP minimisation question

As I mentioned in other messages a while ago, I wrote a trivial/special-purpose thing which does a limited version of SoA.  I'm now slowly writing a more general one which is inevitably suffering from serious second-system syndrome.

One of the things it needs to do is maintain information at the class level: things like the layout of the arrays and how slots map onto them, and so on.

Now bear in mind that once, long ago, I was fairly knowledgeable about the AMOP MOP, but for at least a decade I've barely used CLOS at all (I think I've had the classic 'object systems aren't all that' moment).

What I do now is to have a metaclass which has some extra slots and so on.

But an earlier version didn't do that: it just stored the class-level data in properties on the class name.

If we assume that classes always have names (which is a restriction I am more than happy with) is there really *any* good reason not to do this and thus rely less on MOP features (I still need some small ones).  Performance is not a good reason: these things are never used when that matters since their entire purpose is to enable the system to compile things away.

I realise this is an ideological question: assume I would rather minimise my code's exposure to the MOP even if using it is The Right Thing.

--tim

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