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From: twl@brunix (Ted "Theodore" (W) Leung)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Reflection In Object-Oriented Systems
Keywords: reflection, definitions sought
Message-ID: <17747@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 12 Oct 89 20:12:34 GMT
References: <599@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: twl@boojum.UUCP (Ted "Theodore" (W) Leung)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 28

In article <599@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> eberard@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Edward Berard) writes:
>I have been researching the concept of "reflection" in object-oriented
>systems, e.g.:
>	- The series of papers in the OOPSLA '89 proceedings:
I haven't had a chance to look these over yet, but I will as soon as
my copy of the proceedings arrives...
>
>I am interested in accomplishing the following:
>	2. Developing a taxonomy of reflection. 

I'd be interested to hear about your classification of reflection types

>	3. Developing a rationale for considering reflection. 
At this point, I think that reflection has some applications to
building debugging tools and monitoring tools, in addition to the
applications mentions in Maes' paper.  You might also look at the
paper by Watanabe and Yonezawa in the OOPSLA '88 proceedings.  They
give some other examples.  At this point, I think that one of the most
distressing problems is that reflective systems are just very slow,
because of the overhead involved in maintaining a causal connection
between the meta system and the object system.  I think that one of
the places where reflection will prove to be most useful is the area
of self-adapting software.

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