GOOPS plans

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj at mdj dot nada dot kth dot se>]

I stepped down as GOOPS maintainer since I had the intention to quit
working with Guile development.  But since I've changed my mind,
Christian and I decided that I become GOOPS maintainer again.

This means that it is ultimately I and Maciej (since there are plans
to integrate GOOPS with Guile) who ultimately makes decisions about
how to change GOOPS.

I'm saying this with the current GOOPS-module system debate in mind,
because I'd like to guarantee you that we won't make any rash
decisions about GOOPS design in this respect.

I see the current discussion as a useful play with ideas to elucidate
problems in GOOPS and perhaps come up with useful new ideas.  But I
won't include new ideas into GOOPS until I'm sure it is a good move,
and I can tell you we're very far from that.


Still, it is my view that GOOPS has to change further in order to be
more adapted to the nature of Scheme.

While LISP is "centered around" symbols, Scheme is centered around
objects.  Because of this, the GOOPS MOP will change to also be
centered around objects.  E. g., slots will no longer be identified by
a name, but by a slot definition object.

This means that slot-ref/set! *will* be outdated.  (They are going to
be supported in the STklos compatibility module, however.)  I know
that this is a bit controversial, but we have already had a long
discussion about this in the past.  While that discussion didn't end
in consensus, the support for this change was stronger.  After long
consideration, the decision is now made to carry it through.

The canonic way of accessing slots is through accessors.  An accessor
is a generic function with setter with get and set methods for a
particular slot specialized to the class carrying the slot.  (This is
what accessors look like already now.)

/mdj

P.S. I know that several people are now waiting for me to do things.
     Unfortunately this weekend didn't have as much time for Guile as
     I had wished.  I promise to make efforts to get new Guile time as
     soon as possible.