Книга: Practical Common Lisp

DEFMETHOD

DEFMETHOD

Now you're ready to use DEFMETHOD to define methods that implement withdraw.[175]

A method's parameter list must be congruent with its generic function's. In this case, that means all methods defined on withdraw must have exactly two required parameters. More generally, methods must have the same number of required and optional parameters and must be capable of accepting any arguments corresponding to any &rest or &key parameters specified by the generic function.[176]

Since the basics of withdrawing are the same for all accounts, you can define a method that specializes the account parameter on the bank-account class. You can assume the function balance returns the current balance of the account and can be used with SETF—and thus with DECF—to set the balance. The function ERROR is a standard function used to signal an error, which I'll discuss in greater detail in Chapter 19. Using those two functions, you can define a basic withdraw method that looks like this:

(defmethod withdraw ((account bank-account) amount)
(when (< (balance account) amount)
(error "Account overdrawn."))
(decf (balance account) amount))

As this code suggests, the form of DEFMETHOD is even more like that of DEFUN than DEFGENERIC's is. The only difference is that the required parameters can be specialized by replacing the parameter name with a two-element list. The first element is the name of the parameter, and the second element is the specializer, either the name of a class or an EQL specializer, the form of which I'll discuss in a moment. The parameter name can be anything—it doesn't have to match the name used in the generic function, though it often will.

This method will apply whenever the first argument to withdraw is an instance of bank-account. The second parameter, amount, is implicitly specialized on T, and since all objects are instances of T, it doesn't affect the applicability of the method.

Now suppose all checking accounts have overdraft protection. That is, each checking account is linked to another bank account that's drawn upon when the balance of the checking account itself can't cover a withdrawal. You can assume that the function overdraft-account takes a checking-account object and returns a bank-account object representing the linked account.

Thus, withdrawing from a checking-account object requires a few extra steps compared to withdrawing from a standard bank-account object. You must first check whether the amount being withdrawn is greater than the account's current balance and, if it is, transfer the difference from the overdraft account. Then you can proceed as with a standard bank-account object.

So what you'd like to do is define a method on withdraw that specializes on checking-account to handle the transfer and then lets the method specialized on bank-account take control. Such a method might look like this:

(defmethod withdraw ((account checking-account) amount)
(let ((overdraft (- amount (balance account))))
(when (plusp overdraft)
(withdraw (overdraft-account account) overdraft)
(incf (balance account) overdraft)))
(call-next-method))

The function CALL-NEXT-METHOD is part of the generic function machinery used to combine applicable methods. It indicates that control should be passed from this method to the method specialized on bank-account.[177] When it's called with no arguments, as it is here, the next method is invoked with whatever arguments were originally passed to the generic function. It can also be called with arguments, which will then be passed onto the next method.

You aren't required to invoke CALL-NEXT-METHOD in every method. However, if you don't, the new method is then responsible for completely implementing the desired behavior of the generic function. For example, if you had a subclass of bank-account, proxy-account, that didn't actually keep track of its own balance but instead delegated withdrawals to another account, you might write a method like this (assuming a function, proxied-account, that returns the proxied account):

(defmethod withdraw ((proxy proxy-account) amount)
(withdraw (proxied-account proxy) amount))

Finally, DEFMETHOD also allows you to create methods specialized on a particular object with an EQL specializer. For example, suppose the banking app is going to be deployed in a particularly corrupt bank. Suppose the variable *account-of-bank-president* holds a reference to a particular bank account that belongs—as the name suggests—to the bank's president. Further suppose the variable *bank* represents the bank as a whole, and the function embezzle steals money from the bank. The bank president might ask you to "fix" withdraw to handle his account specially.

(defmethod withdraw ((account (eql *account-of-bank-president*)) amount)
(let ((overdraft (- amount (balance account))))
(when (plusp overdraft)
(incf (balance account) (embezzle *bank* overdraft)))
(call-next-method)))

Note, however, that the form in the EQL specializer that provides the object to specialize on—*account-of-bank-president* in this case—is evaluated once, when the DEFMETHOD is evaluated. This method will be specialized on the value of *account-of-bank-president* at the time the method is defined; changing the variable later won't change the method.

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