Reflection and hyper-programming in persistent programming systems

[摘要] In an orthogonally persistent programming system, data is treated in a manner independent ofits persistence. This gives simpler semantics, allows the programmer to ignore details oflong-term data storage and enables type checking protection mechanisms to operate over theentire lifetime of the data.The ultimate goal of persistent programming language research is to reduce the costs ofproducing software. The work presented in this thesis seeks to improve programmerproductivity in the following ways:• by reducing the amount of code that has to be written to construct an application;• by increasing the reliability of the code written; and• by improving the programmer’s understanding of the persistent environment in whichapplications are constructed.Two programming techniques that may be used to pursue these goals in a persistentenvironment are type-safe linguistic reflection and hyper-programming. The first provides amechanism by which the programmer can write generators that, when executed, produce newprogram representations. This allows the specification of programs that are highly genericyet depend in non-trivial ways on the types of the data on which they operate. Genericitypromotes software reuse which in turn reduces the amount of new code that has to be written.Hyper-programming allows a source program to contain links to data items in the persistentstore. This improves program reliability by allowing certain program checking to beperformed earlier than is otherwise possible. It also reduces the amount of code written bypermitting direct links to data in the place of textual descriptions.Both techniques contribute to the understanding of the persistent environment throughsupporting the implementation of store browsing tools and allowing source representations tobe associated with all executable programs in the persistent store.This thesis describes in detail the structure of type-safe linguistic reflection and hyper-programming,their benefits in the persistent context, and a suite of programming tools thatsupport reflective programming and hyper-programming. These tools may be used inconjunction to allow reflection over hyper-program representations. The implementation ofthe tools is described.

[发布机构] University:University of St Andrews;Department:Computer Science (School of)

[效力级别] Programming languages (Electronic computers)

[关键词] Computer software;Programming languages (Electronic computers)