🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> On Sat, 7 Nov 1992 00:35:37 GMT, charest@Aig.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Len Charest) said:

   Len> Interesting question. In my program I'm actually using the
   Len> class-prototype to access a *shared* slot (allocation :class).
   Len> That is, I'm more interested in a 'CLASS-VOLUNTEER' than a
   Len> prototype. This approach works, but should it?  My
   Len> understanding is that 'the slots' of class-prototype remain
   Len> uninitialized;


A recent message of mine may have mislead you into thinking that
class prototypes must be uninitialized.  A reply to that
message by Jon "Lucid" White suggests that this lack of initialization
is a matter of expedience rather than requirement.  I read his message
as saying that class-prototype unboundness for instances of
non-metaclasses is Lucid's way of saying the following:  There is no
way to predict an application instance's slots contents; so we would
not know what to cache in a prototype's slot that would be useful to
anyone.  We find it efficient in the case of metaobjects, however, to
do caching since metaclass instances tend to share certain components
of their slot contents and these cached components save us time when
initializing these instances.  Note that

(inspect
 (clos:class-prototype
  (class-of (find-class 'some-application-instance))))

shows some of this cached information.

   Is this a fair extrapolation on your reply, Jon?



                                   Eric Peterson (speaking for myself)
                                   Systems Research and Applications
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