From: Mamdouh Ibrahim
Subject: Re: CFP-ECOOP/OOPSLA workshop on Reflection and Metalevel Architectures in OOP
Date:
Message-ID: <114@altair.edsdrd.eds.com>
In article <······················@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu>, ········@cpsin3.uucp (Hansye S. Dulimarta) writes:
> Could somebody tell me the definition of 'reflective programming language'?
> [or give a pointer to references about this topic]. Thanks a lot.
>
> Hans.
Very simply stated, a programming language is considered reflective if it can
operate on itself. This simple definition gives rise to many complex issues
related to the subject such as metacircular interpreters, infinite towers,
metalevel structures, reification, computational reflection, etc.
Until recently, most of the work in this area was done (and initiated)
by researchers from the LISP community, in particular, Brian Smith [6],
Smith and des Rivieres [7] and the follow up work by Wand and Friedman [8].
In OOPSLA 87, Maes [5] presented an excellent paper on computational
reflection in object-oriented systems. Since then, more papers have been
published on reflection in object-oriented programming and systems, e.g.,
[1, 2, 3, 4, 9].
During OOPSLA 89, Brian Foote initiated a Birds Of a Feather session to
discuss some of the issues related to this topic. Based on the BOF, a
workshop on reflection and metalevel architectures in object-oriented
programming will be held in conjunction with ECOOP/OOPSLA 90 in Ottawa,
Canada.
The following is by no means an exhaustive list of references to this topic.
[1] Ferber, J., "Computational Reflection in Class Based Object-Oriented
Languages," Proceedings of OOPSLA '89, 1989, pp. 317-326.
[2] Foote, B. and Johnson, R. E., "Reflective Facilities in Smalltalk-80,"
Proceedings of OOPSLA '89, 1989, pp. 327-336.
[3] Graube, N., "Metaclass Compatibility," Proceedings of OOPSLA '89, 1989,
pp. 305-315.
[4] Ibrahim, M. H. and Cummins, F. A., "KSL: A Reflective Object-Oriented
Programming Language," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference
on Computer Languages, 1988, pp. 186-193.
[5] Maes, P., "Concepts and Experiments in Computational Reflection,"
Proccedings of OOPSLA '87, 1987, pp. 147-155.
[6] Smith, B. C., "Reflection and Semantics in Lisp," Conf. Rec. 11th ACM
Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages, 1984, pp. 23-35.
[7] Smith, B. C. and des Rivieres, J., "The Implementation of Procedurally
Reflective Languages," Proc. 1984 ACM Symposium on Lisp and Functional
Programming, 1984, pp. 331-347.
[8] Wand, M. and Friedman, D., "The Mystery of the Tower Revealed: A Non-
Reflective Description of the Reflective Tower," Proceedings of the 1986
Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, 1986, pp. 298-307.
[9] Watanabe, T. and Yonezawa, A., "Reflection in an Object-Oriented Concurrent
Language," Proceedings of OOPSLA '88, 1988, pp. 306-315.
---------
Mamdouh H. Ibrahim - EDS Research & Development
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···@edsdrd.eds.com