Re: MAKE-INSTANCE and STRUCTURE-CLASS

On 6 Jul 2026, at 14:31, David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> But now we are getting into the weeds of language lawyering, and I’m not even sure how to interpret the last comments about bureaucracy. Either you want to accomplish a goal or you don’t. Not sure how arguing about arcane corners of language design, “as the founding fahers envifrsioned it”, helps out?

I had interpreted Marco's question to be 'can you use make-instance with structures in portable CL?', to which the answer I gave was no.  It turns out that the eql-method trick maybe means you sort-of can, but it makes me itch (and will certainly break existing code).

I wasn't answering the question about what you can do in some specific implementation.

The comment about bureaucracy is aimed at CLOS, not you (and also a play on a famous quote about racing cars).  CLOS provides this giant bureaucracy around creating instances, and I'm suggesting that just passing an argument which you call to create whatever it is may often be a radically simpler approach than trying to persuade make-instance to deal with structures, or providing some one-true-object-allocator.  In other words I'm suggesting that may be code shouldn't wire in make-instance at all but accept a parameter.

--tim


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