Abstract
Introducing meta-level access in a programming language is a delicate task, surrounded by threats of vicious circularity, infinite regress and unresolveable paradoxes on the one hand and triviality on the other hand. The reflective tower is one of the attempts to structure computational reflection, that is, access from a running process to its computational state.
This paper gives the framework of a denotational semantics of a reflective tower, isolating the features which we have found to be sufficient to describe this model. The framework is then used to analyze some concrete problems in a reflective tower based on the programming language Scheme with continuations as applicable objects.
The paper first gives a brief description of the reflective tower and discusses the unstable points in the design. Then the denotational description is outlined and used to analyze these points and to clarify the consequences of the necessary design decisions.
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References
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© 1990 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Malmkjær, K. (1990). On some semantic issues in the reflective tower. In: Main, M., Melton, A., Mislove, M., Schmidt, D. (eds) Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics. MFPS 1989. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 442. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0040260
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0040260
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