Reflection in an object-oriented concurrent language

Abstract

Our work is along the line of the work of B. Smith and P. Maes. We first discuss our notion of reflection in object-oriented concurrent computation and then present a reflective object-oriented concurrent language ABCL/R. We give several illustrative examples of reflective programming such as (1) dynamic concurrent acquisition of “methods” from other objects, (2) monitoring the behavior of concurrently running objects, and (3) augmentation of the time warp mechanism to a concurrent system. Also the definition of a meta-circular interpreter of this language is given as the definition of a meta-object. The language ABCL/R has been implemented. All the examples given in this paper are running on our ABCL/R system.