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From: john@LINUS.MITRE.ORG
Newsgroups: comp.lang.clos
Subject: Re: Beefs about lambda list congruency
Message-ID: <9103151842.AA03261@clouseau.mitre.org>
Date: 15 Mar 91 18:42:23 GMT
Sender: welch@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: inet
Organization: CommonLoops
Lines: 18

kramer@wotan.ai.toronto.edu ("Bryan M. Kramer") writes:

  So in summary, my complaint is that the number of
  number of required parameters has to be the same.

The problem seems to be that you are thinking of methods as analogous
to functions.  They are not.  A method is a PIECE of a function, a
generic function.  In particular, it is NOT possible in CLOS to apply
a method object in isolation, via FUNCALL or APPLY.

So, you seem to want the generic function to take different numbers of
required arguments at different times.  Huh?  If they're different at
different times, then they're not always required.  So, you want some
of the required arguments to be optional.  But only sometimes.

Is this starting to sound somewhat problematic?

John Burger