Towards a Fully-reflective Meta-programming Language

The term meta-programming language is used to describe languages that have some capability for manipulating code. A multi-stage language is a kind of meta-programming language that allows static typechecking of dynamically generated code. The expressiveness and type-safety of multi-stage languages have led to their success in many applications that require code generation. This paper presents the design of a multi-stage language that is an extension to a traditional object-oriented language (e.g. C# or Java). The language has a static type system and allows types and code to be manipulated dynamically, hence giving it full re ection over the structure of a program. The language is discussed through a series of examples on run-time optimisation, serialiser generation and compiler construction. A prototype compiler for the language has been implemented which targets Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (.NET).