I have been working my way through Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. In one of the chapters (ch.24) Seibel illustrates keeping track of the inherited slots of a class by tucking the information away in a symbol plist.

This immediately made me wonder why he did not use something built in to the object system to query a class about itself. Thus I came to investigate MOP stuff, which I believe does provide for the functionality needed in Seibel's example. (I used MOP fns CLASS-SLOTS and CLASS-DIRECT-SLOTS to do the job.)

I am considering ordering the book The Art of the MetaObject Protocol by Kiczales et al. However, I wonder if that is really the book I want. I am not so much interested in how it is all implemented as I am in learning about fairly pragmatic reflection functionality.

Is anyone familiar with this book? Is it mostly about implementing CLOS? Is there a better resource for learning to use MOP functionality at a basic level?

thx

- Dave -