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5.3 Chained Methods

Sometimes it is useful to have a method that adds functionality to existing methods. Chained methods provide a mechanism to accomplish this. A chained method, when invoked, can call the method that would have been called had this method not been defined: it is passed a procedure that will call the inherited method. The chained method can run arbitrary code both before and after calling the inherited method.

Procedure: make-chained-method specializers procedure

Create and return a chained method. Procedure must be a procedure of one argument that returns a procedure. When the chained method is combined, its procedure will be called with one argument, a “call-next-method” procedure; it must then return another procedure that will be called when the method is invoked. The “call-next-method” procedure may called by the method procedure at any time, which will invoke the next less-specific method. The “call-next-method” procedure must be called with the same number of arguments as the method procedure; normally these are the same arguments, but that is not required.

Procedure: chained-method? object

Returns #t if object is a chained method, otherwise returns #f. Note that every chained method satisfies method?.