Gilad Bracha, David Ungar. Mirrors: design principles for meta-level facilities of object-oriented programming languages. In John M. Vlissides, Douglas C. Schmidt, editors, Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2004. pages 331-344, ACM, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2004. [doi]
We identify three design principles for reflection and metaprogramming facilities in object oriented programming languages. Encapsulation: meta-level facilities must encapsulate their implementation. Stratification: meta-level facilities must be separated from base-level functionality. Ontological correspondence: the ontology of meta-level facilities should correspond to the ontology of the language they manipulate. Traditional/mainstream reflective architectures do not follow these precepts. In contrast, reflective APIs built around the concept of mirrors are characterized by adherence to these three principles. Consequently, mirror-based architectures have significant advantages with respect to distribution, deployment and general purpose metaprogramming.