MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Monday, 06-Jan-97 21:14:21 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 2228 Last-Modified: Thursday, 20-Jun-96 19:31:12 GMT
Reflection is a way of allowing a computational system to examine, reason about, and modify its own behavior. Applied to a programming language implementation, this technique might be used to allow a language to support different abstractions or to make given abstractions more efficient. Open Implementations contains pointers to a number of topics along these lines.
Syntactic extensions in RScheme are reputed to be the underlying mechanism which supports reflection on scope and other compiler innards. An out-of-date sketch of the design of a new syntactic extension facility implemented in an interpreter which might be the basis for this is here. The system has been documented in my Master's thesis, which will soon be available on the OOPS Group Web page. Literate Programming Library.