Naming suggestions

[Faré]

For the record, uiop has a general (but not extensible) accessor
called access-at.
lisp-interface-library has an extensible interface function lookup —
and yes, it works both on alist and on plist (if you supply an
appropriate interface object).

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
The shipwreck survivor's law: after a catastrophe, only the few survivors
erect votive shrines to thank deities for having saved them. The many
casualties don't erect anti-shrines to spit their contempt at the same
deities that failed to save them.



On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Steve Haflich <shaflich at gmail.com> wrote:
> <silly_question>
> Does it work for plists? For alists?
> </silly_question>
>
> Can the user write methods to add his own structures/classes/constructs to
> the set understood by REF?
>
> More seriously, this function seems to me to be an over generalization,
> distorting CL style.  Built into the numerous built-in ways of supporting
> data in CL are assumptions about the efficiency and scaling of the various
> kinds. Although efficiency might not matter for particular low-bandwidth
> operations, in other places it will certainly matter.  That's obvious.  But
> even more important is that use of an over-generalized reference operator
> makes the code harder to read and understand.  If I see an aref, I know I'm
> looking at an array, understand something about the expected performance,
> and know what to look for elsewhere in a huge module to examine where this
> array is constructed and modified.
>
> For me, traditional CL operators have a nice, time-tested balance between
> generality and specificity.