A remark about research on reflection

Serge Stinckwich Serge.Stinckwich at info.unicaen.fr
Sat Apr 7 13:53:57 UTC 2001


At Sat, 07 Apr 2001 10:06:39 +0200,
Stephane Ducasse wrote:
> I just to share some thoughts I have a about reflection.
> 
> First I was thinking that research on reflection is ***not*** about redoing
> the past but I was wrong:
> People think that putting metaclasses in Java are interesting research:
>             http://home.austin.rr.com/forman/ira/jem.pdf
> (the conceptual contents of this paper is Smalltalk-76 -> ObjVlisp 87
> and some design ideas for Java).
> 
> Second I really think that Smalltalk stopped its evolution in the area of
> reflection and other capabilities and it would be good if some new ideas and
> prototypes would be tested in Smalltalk and Squeak in particular.
> I think that I will restart working on reflection. I would really like
> to see if some other research groups would be interested to work on similar
> ideas. 

I'm also interessed by reflection and meta-reflective architectures since my Phd
thesis on concurrents objects and agents implementation. I agree with Stef, people seems to
rediscover old concepts of reflexivity with Java.

I think Squeak should include and use a meta-classes framework
like Classtalk or NeoClasstalk
(<http://www.emn.fr/cs/object/tools/neoclasstalk/neoclasstalk.html>).
There is also some tools for concurrent/distributed objets or agents
like Coda, ReActalk, but these tools have never been release or are no more available.

Have fun,

PS1 : There is a french version (sorry) of my thesis on my home page that
deals with agents implementation, but it's a bit old now (90-94) ;-)

PS2 : I'm looking for an open-source multi-agents framework based on
Smalltalk or Squeak. Does such beast exist ?

-- 
Serge Stinckwich                                   -< )  http://multiagent.com/
CNRS UMR 6072>GREYC>I3>SMILE                        /~\  http://debian.org/           
Université de Caen>IUT de Caen>Campus 3>Dept Info  (/  | http://zope.org/             
http://www.iutc3.unicaen.fr/~stincs                _|_/  Zope-edu
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