Building a Completely Adaptable Reflective System
Francisco Ortín, Juan Manuel Cueva Lovelle · 2001
Abstract. Reflection is one of the main techniques used to develop adaptable sys-tems and, currently, different kinds of reflective systems exist. Compile-time re-flection systems provide the ability to customize their language but they are not adaptable at runtime. On the other hand, runtime reflection systems define meta-object protocols to customize the system semantics at runtime. However, these meta-object protocols restrict the way a system may be adapted before its execu-tion, and they do not permit the customization of its language. Our system implements a non-restrictive reflection mechanism over a virtual ma-chine, in which every feature may be adapted at runtime. No meta-object protocol is used and, therefore, it is not needed to specify previously what may be reflected. With our reflective system, the programming language may be also customized at runtime. 1