Actor reflection without meta-objects

  • Authors:

  • Tanaka Tomoyuki

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA/ECOOP '90 Proceedings of the workshop on Object-based concurrent programming
  • Year:
  • 1991

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Abstract

We consider how reflection should be introduced into an actor language, where reflection is a mechanism for allowing a program to have access to the data structures of its own processor. Rather than introducing meta-objects as in the previous work, we propose to introduce reflection through two kinds of special messages: reifying and reflecting messages. We show that the full range of reflective programming in an actor language is possible without introducing meta-objects, and argue that our approach provides a more uniform interface for actors than the meta-object approach. All the examples in this paper have been tested on our prototype actor system.