🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <19920410191337.6.BARMAR@occam.think.com> barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:

       ...
       > spec, which say that WITH-ACCESSORS is equivalent to a use of
       > SYMBOL-MACROLET that replaces the "variable" references with calls to
       > the specified accessor.  Why should this SYMBOL-MACROLET expansion be
       > dependent on how the accessor is defined?

       Don't look at me, I never understood what this sentence is trying to say.

       However, if I was forced to guess, I would guess that the sentence from
       CLtL2 means that with-accessors is only a syntactic transformation: it
       will generate calls to some functions but it won't define the functions
       if they aren't already defined.  You still have to use :accessor or
       :reader or :writer in your defclass, even if you never directly write
       calls to the functions defined there in your program, but only use
       them indirectly via with-accessors.

   That's a possible interpretation.  That's certainly what I *thought* we
   intended to require.

There is a problem with that interpretation though.  with-slots allows
the access (read and write) to slots regardless of the definition
of appropriate access methods,  I can easily imagine that
with-accessors should do the same except with a functional style
in place of a variable style.

IMHO,  orthogonal design should hold excepting cases where it breaks
existing code,  so either with-slots should require :reader, :writer,
:accessor definitions or with-accessors should not require :r, :w, :a.
--
Douglas S. Rand 
Internet:   <dsrand@mitre.org>
Snail:	    MITRE, Burlington Road, Bedford, MA 
Disclaimer: MITRE might agree with me - then again...
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