>Does CLOS support sending messages to classes in the way LOOPS (on the
>Xerox 1108) used to (using the prototype syntax)? Otherwise, I have to
>create an instance to evaluate a method for that class... is that
>right?
CLOS supports computational reflection. Ordinary CLOS classes are thus
instances of a metaclass. When "defclass" is used, the metaclass
defaults to "standard-class". Thus, a generic function specialized on
standard-class will apply to the instances of this metaclass. These
instances are the classes defined with defclass. A useful terminology
refers to the ordinary CLOS classes as 1st-level instances of the metaclass
and the instances of an ordinary CLOS class as 2nd-level instances of
the metaclass. The term "2nd level instance" was first used in
Graube, Nicolas, "Metaclass Compatibility." Proceedings of the 1989 Object
Oriented Programming: System Languages, and Applications Conference
(OOPSLA-89), pp. 305-315, 1989.
In our own work here at DEC, we extended the terminology
with "1st level instance".
Alan Gunderson