A Generic Reification Technique for Object-Oriented Reflective Languages

Computational reflection is gaining interest in practical applications as witnessed by the use of reflection in the JAVA programming environment and recent work on reflective middleware. Reflective systems offer many different reflection programming interfaces, the so-called MetaObject Protocols (MOPs). Their design is subject to a number of constraints relating to, among others, expressive power, efficiency and security properties. Since these constraints are different from one application to another, we should be able to easily provide specially-tailored MOPs. In this paper, we present a generic reification technique based on program transformation. It enables the selective reification of arbitrary parts of object-oriented metacircular interpreters. The program transformation can be applied to different interpreter definitions. Each resulting reflective implementation provides a different MOP directly derived from the original interpreter definition.