Reflection, Metalevel Computation, and Strategies

Abstract

Informally, a reflective logic is a logic in which important aspects of its metatheory can be represented at the object level in a consistent way, so that the object-level representation correctly simulates the relevant metatheoretic aspects. In other words, a reflective logic is a logic which can be faithfully interpreted in itself. Maude’s language design and implementation make systematic use of the fact that rewriting logic is reflective [66, 56, 67, 68]. This makes the metatheory of rewriting logic accessible to the user in a clear and principled way. However, since a naive implementation of reflection can be computationally expensive, a good implementation must provide efficient ways of performing reflective computations. This chapter explains how this is achieved in Maude through its predefined META-LEVEL module, that can be found in the prelude.maude file.