ANSI Common Lisp   7 Objects   7.2 Changing the Class of an Instance

7.2.2 Initializing Newly Added Local Slots

The generic function update-instance-for-different-class is invoked on arguments computed by change-class. The first argument passed is a copy of the instance being updated and is an instance of the class C_from; this copy has dynamic extent within the generic function change-class. The second argument is the instance as updated so far by change-class and is an instance of the class C_to. The remaining arguments are an initialization argument list.

There is a system-supplied primary method for update-instance-for-different-class that has two parameter specializers, each of which is the class standard-object. First this method checks the validity of initialization arguments and signals an error if an initialization argument is supplied that is not declared as valid. (For more information, see Section 7.1.2 Declaring the Validity of Initialization Arguments.) Then it calls the generic function shared-initialize with the following arguments: the new instance, a list of names of the newly added slots, and the initialization arguments it received.