Towards a Methodology for Explicit Composition of MetaObjects

Abstract

Reflective programming languages are those where users' programs are allowed to customize in an organized way the behavior of the language to their own needs. For ten years now, most of the work on reflection revolved around the definition and the implementation of metaobject protocols which express this organization. No methodologies have been proposed for reflective programming per se. This paper proposes a first one aiming at the design of composable metaobjects. Given two independently developed reflective customizations, this methodology proposes principles to be observed in their design such that they can be composed using standard base-level aggregation or specialization. While this paper focuses on a simple MOP and illustrates the methodology on specific examples, this methodology can be generalized to other languages with different MOPs. For instance, we discuss how to adapt it to CLOS.