Meta-level programming with codA

Abstract

Meta-levels are complex pieces of software with diverse demands in both the computation and interaction domains. Common techniques using just code to express behaviour fail to clearly assign responsibility for a particular behaviour’s definition or to provide support for the reuse or integration of existing behaviour descriptions. The techniques of fine-grained decomposition of meta-level behaviour into objects and their subsequent composition into object models provides a framework for creating, reusing and integrating complex object behaviours. Using such a framework, we show that users can develop and integrate quite different object models while retaining a high degree of abstraction and fostering meta-level component reuse.