The Oberon-2 Reflection Model and its Applications

Hanspeter Mössenböck, Christoph Steindl
Johannes Kepler University Linz
Institute for Practical Computer Science
Altenbergerstraße 69, A-4040 Linz
{moessenboeck, steindl}@ssw.uni-linz.ac.at

Abstract

We describe the reflection model of Oberon-2, a language in the tradition of Pascal and Modula-2. It provides run-time information about the structure of variables, types and procedures and allows the programmer to manipulate the values of variables. The special aspect of the Oberon-2 reflection model is that metainformation is not obtained via metaclasses. It is rather organized as structured sequences of elements stored on a disk, which can be enumerated by an iterator. This results in a simple and uniform access mechanism and keeps the memory overhead to a minimum. We also show a number of challenging applications that have been implemented with this reflection model.

Paper at the Reflection'99, St. Malo, France, July 19-21, 1999. LNCS 1616, Springer, pp. 40-53
Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1616 (pp. 40-53), ISBN 3-540-66280-4, Springer-Verlag, 1999.
The copyright for this publication is held by Springer.
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