Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Reflection In Object-Oriented Systems
Message-ID: <1279@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 25 Oct 89 16:59:03 GMT
References: <599@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> <RH.89Oct13142047@linus.mitre.org>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 29

In article <RH.89Oct13142047@linus.mitre.org> rh@mitre.org (Rich Hilliard) writes:
>>	   1. Developing a definition for reflection which reflects the
>>	      _concept_, not a particular _implementation_ of reflection.
>
>You want to take a look at the early papers by Brian Smith,
>particularly his doctoral thesis at MIT, "Reflection and Semantics in
>a Procedural Language" (1982). 

If you're interested in Brian Smith's work and want to see a very
clear presentation of how reflection can be accomplished in Lisp,
you should look at

   Alan Bawden.  Reification without Evaluation.  Proceedings
   of the 1988 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming.

From the abstract;

   Constructin gself-referential systems, such as Brian Smith's
   3-Lisp language, is actually more straightforward than you
   think.  ...  In particular, it is not necessary to redesign
   quotation, take a stand on the relative merits of evaluation
   vs. normalization, or treat continuations as meta-level
   objects. 

Run, don't walk; do not pass Go; etc.

Jeff Dalton,                      JANET: J.Dalton@uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,        ARPA:  J.Dalton%uk.ac.ed@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.             UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!J.Dalton