Abstract
This paper presents a language (called Metaphor) for expressing staged programs in a strongly-typed, imperative, object-oriented environment. The language is based on a subset of C# or Java; it is multi-stage and provides static type checking of later stage code. Object-oriented frameworks usually offer a type introspection or reflection capability to discover information about types at run-time. Metaphor allows this reflection system to be incorporated into the language’s staging constructs, thus allowing the generation of code based on the structure of types – a common application for code generation in these environments. The paper presents the language, gives a formal description of its type system and discusses a prototype implementation of the language as a compiler targeting the .NET Common Language Runtime.
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Neverov, G., Roe, P. (2004). Metaphor: A Multi-stage, Object-Oriented Programming Language. In: Karsai, G., Visser, E. (eds) Generative Programming and Component Engineering. GPCE 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3286. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30175-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30175-2_9
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