goops proposal: proper struct classes

[Andy Wingo]

Hello all,

If you know GOOPS, then you know that we have classes, rooted at
<class>.  And indeed <class> shows up a lot in documentation and in
code.  But that's not how it is in CLOS: our <class> corresponds to
their `standard-class'.  They have a superclass, called `class', which
is the real root, and from which e.g. structure classes are derived.

We need to do this.  Currently, class-of on a struct/record data type
gives a useless class that can't instantiate instances, doesn't know its
slots, and does not reflect the vtable hierarchy.

So we need a <basic-class>, interposed between <class> and <object>,
which will be the real root of our class meta-object hierarchy.

I noticed this while fixing some weak hash table-related bugs today, and
I saw set-struct-vtable-name!, which ends up causing some crazy stuff to
happen (exporting a stub class from (oop goops)), and noticed how wrong
all this was.

Comments?

Andy
-- 
http://wingolog.org/