Non-restrictive computational reflection

Abstract

Adaptable software systems and architectures give the programmer the ability to create applications that might customize themselves to runtime-emerging requirements. Computational reflection is a programming language technique that is commonly used to achieve the development of this kind of systems. Most runtime reflective systems use Meta-Object Protocols (MOPs). However, MOPs restrict the amount of features an application can customize, and the way they can express its own adaptation. Furthermore, this kind of systems uses a fixed programming language: they develop an interpreter, not a whole language-independent platform. What we present in this paper a non-restrictive reflective platform, called nitrO, that achieves a real computational-environment jump, making every application and language feature adaptable at runtime—without any previously defined restriction. Moreover, the platform has been built using a generic interpreter, in which the reflection mechanism is independent of the language selected by the programmer. Different applications may dynamically adapt each other, regardless of the programming language they use.