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From: pallas@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Joe Pallas)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: CLOS: is it OOP?
Message-ID: <11829@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 17 Sep 89 22:00:30 GMT
References: <19582@mimsy.UUCP> <29564@news.Think.COM> <11815@polya.Stanford.EDU> <1989Sep16.221107.22750@odi.com>
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In article <1989Sep16.221107.22750@odi.com> dlw@odi.com (Dan Weinreb) writes:

>What causes the trouble for
>CLOS is the addition of the multimethod concept, and all the changes
>that it implies: there is no such thing as a "method of a class" in
>CLOS, because one function might be involved with more than one class
>at the same time.

Yes, I should have been more precise: it was specifically the multiple
dispatch feature of generic functions in CLOS that I meant.  One could
imagine, I suppose, having multimethods be "of" the classes of all the
discriminant arguments, but that would lead to the kind of
entanglement of different classes that OOP is praised for avoiding.

The whole notion of function dispatch based on arbitrary constraints
seems potentially very powerful, but it is arguably something entirely
different from object-oriented programming.

joe