Common Lisp Object System

The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is the facility for object-oriented programming which is part of ANSI Common Lisp. CLOS is a powerful dynamic object system which differs radically from the OOP facilities found in more static languages such as C++ or Java. CLOS was inspired by earlier Lisp object systems such as MIT Flavors and CommonLoops, although it is more general than either. Originally proposed as an add-on, CLOS was adopted as part of the ANSI standard for Common Lisp and has been adapted into other Lisp dialects such as EuLisp or Emacs Lisp. The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is the facility for object-oriented programming which is part of ANSI Common Lisp. CLOS is a powerful dynamic object system which differs radically from the OOP facilities found in more static languages such as C++ or Java. CLOS was inspired by earlier Lisp object systems such as MIT Flavors and CommonLoops, although it is more general than either. Originally proposed as an add-on, CLOS was adopted as part of the ANSI standard for Common Lisp and has been adapted into other Lisp dialects such as EuLisp or Emacs Lisp. The basic building blocks of CLOS are classes and their methods, instances of those classes, and generic functions.CLOS provides macros to define those: defclass, defmethod, and defgeneric. Instances are created with the function make-instance. Classes can have multiple superclasses, a list of slots (member variables in C++/Java parlance) and a special metaclass. Slots can be allocated by class (all instances of a class share the slot) or by instance. Each slot has a name and the value of a slot can be accessed by that name using the function slot-value. Additionally special generic functions can be defined to write or read values of slots. Each slot in a CLOS class must have a unique name. CLOS is a multiple dispatch system. This means that methods can be specialized upon any or all of their required arguments. Most OO languages are single-dispatch, meaning that methods are only specialized on the first argument. Another unusual feature is that methods do not 'belong' to classes; classes do not provide a namespace for generic functions or methods. Methods are defined separately from classes, and they have no special access (e.g. 'this', 'self', or 'protected') to class slots. Methods in CLOS are grouped into generic functions. A generic function is an object which is callable like a function and which associates a collection of methods with a shared name and argument structure, each specialized for different arguments. Since Common Lisp provides non-CLOS classes for structures and built-in data types (numbers, strings, characters, symbols, ...), CLOS dispatch works also with these non-CLOS classes. CLOS also supports dispatch over individual objects (eql specializers). CLOS does not by default support dispatch over all Common Lisp data types (for example dispatch does not work for fully specialized array types or for types introduced by deftype). However, most Common Lisp implementations provide a metaobject protocol which allows generic functions to provide application specific specialization and dispatch rules.