On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 12:53 AM, Alessio Stalla alessiostalla@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
I found out that ABCL, when redefining a class, modifies the old class metaobject in-place, slot by slot. This has the implication that the redefinition of an instance of a custom metaclass does not update custom slots. Now, I didn't check on the AMOP, but I'm pretty sure the proper class redefinition protocol is more articulate than the one implemented in ABCL; still, applying the patch that you find attached fixes the problem of custom slots not being updated by calling reinitialize-instance where the old code manually updated the class metaobject, so it is, I think, a valid temporary solution until we have a full MOP. However, before committing the patch, I'd like to hear your opinion about it.
The patch also includes some tabs converted to spaces, sorry for the noise.
Additionally, I also rectified the hierarchy for slot-definition and subclasses, introducing the classes standard-slot-definition, standard-direct-slot-definition and standard-effective-slot-definition, as specified by the AMOP (except for the METAOBJECT class, which is missing and should be on the CPL of all metaobject classes). I ran the ANSI tests and got 33 failures, one less than before (but that could be a randomized test passing, I didn't check). While I find it unlikely that someone has code defining custom slot definitions that relies on the previous class hierarchy, this is a potentially breaking change, so comments are welcome. If no one speaks up in a few days, I will commit the patch on trunk and notify the mailing list.
Cheers, Alessio