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## 9 Association Lists

Lisp offers the concept of association lists, with primitives such as `assoc` used to access them. The following functions can be used to manage association lists of EIEIO objects:

Function: object-assoc key slot list

  Return an object if key is equal to SLOT’s value of an object in list. list is a list of objects whose slots are searched. Objects in list do not need to have a slot named slot, nor does slot need to be bound. If these errors occur, those objects will be ignored.

Function: object-assoc-list slot list

  Return an association list generated by extracting slot from all objects in list. For each element of list the `car` is the value of slot, and the `cdr` is the object it was extracted from. This is useful for generating completion tables.

Function: eieio-build-class-alist &optional base-class

  Returns an alist of all currently defined classes. This alist is suitable for completion lists used by interactive functions to select a class. The optional argument base-class allows the programmer to select only a subset of classes which includes base-class and all its subclasses.