The next 700 reflective object-oriented languages

Abstract

Since Smith seminal work, there have been numerous reflective language definitionand implementation proposals. These proposals, initially restricted to functional languages,have been quickly extended to object-oriented languages. Unfortunately, reflective objectorientedlanguage definitions remained mostly ad hoc.In this paper, we present a generic reification technique which enables the selective reificationof arbitrary parts of object-oriented language interpreters. Our program transformationcan be applied to different interpreter definitions. Each resulting reflective implementationprovides a different meta-object protocol based on the original interpreter definition.This technique paves the way to a systematic study of reflective object-oriented languageimplementations.Technical report no.: 99-1-INFO1Contents1 Motivation and related work 32 Smithsonian Reflection 43 System architecture 43.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....