Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Reflection has proved to be a powerful feature to support the design of development environments and to extend languages.However, the granularity of structural reflection stops at the method level.This is a problem since without sub-method reflection developers have to duplicate efforts, for example to introduce transparently pluggable type-checkers or fine-grained profilers.In this paper we present Persephone, an efficient implementation of a sub-method meta-object protocol (MOP) based on AST annotations and dual methods (a compiled method and its meta-object) that reconcile AST expressiveness with bytecode execution.We validate the MOP by presenting TreeNurse, a method instrumentation framework and TypePlug, an optional, pluggable type system which is based on Persephone. CHALLENGES FOR SUPPORTING SUB-METHOD REFLECTIONTo support the need of different tools such as a code browser, a code coverage tool or a refactoring engine, we need a representation that is extensible, it should allow tools to annotate the structural elements with metadata and the use of metadata for 276
Source: The Journal of Object Technology
Institutions: University of Bern, Université Savoie Mont Blanc
Language: English
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2039028802