Concepts and experiments in computational reflection

This paper brings some perspective to various concepts in computational reflection. A definition of computational reflection is presented, the importance of computational reflection is discussed and the architecture of languages that support reflection is studied. Further, this paper presents a survey of some experiments in reflection which have been performed. Examples of existing procedural, logic-based and rule-based languages with an architecture for reflection are briefly presented. The main part of the paper describes an original experiment to introduce a reflective architecture in an object-oriented language. It stresses the contributions of this language to the field of object-oriented programming and illustrates the new programming style made possible. The examples show that a lot of programming problems that were previously handled on an ad hoc basis, can in a reflective architecture be solved more elegantly.