Declarable Modifiers: A Proposal to Increase the Efficacy of Metaclasses

  • Authors:

  • Ira R. Forman

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st OOPSLA Workshop on Reflection and Software Engineering: Reflection and Software Engineering, Papers from OORaSE 1999
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

The amount of information available to metaprogrammer during intercession is limited. If a metaprogrammer has more information about the intentions of a programmer, the metaprogrammer can create more useful facilities. This paper proposes that object-oriented programming languages be designed so that metaprogrammers can declare new modifiers for methods and instance variables. Class programmers can use these modifiers to communicate intentions during intercession to the facilities created by metaprogrammers. This paper presents an extension to Java that has metaclasses. The intercessional features of the metaclasses are enhanced with the ability to declare both method and field modifiers. These modifiers are used by class programmers to communicate with a metaclass and control the effect of its intercession.