Reflective programming
ability of a process to examine, introspect and modify itself
In computer science, reflective programming or reflection is the ability of a process to examine, introspect, and modify its own structure and behavior.
Historical background
The earliest computers were programmed in their native assembly languages, which were inherently reflective, as these original architectures could be programmed by defining instructions as data and using self-modifying code. As the bulk of programming moved to higher-level compiled languages such as ALGOL, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, and C, this reflective ability largely disappeared until new programming languages with reflection built into their type systems appeared.
Brian Cantwell Smith's 1982 doctoral dissertation introduced the notion of computational reflection in procedural programming languages and the notion of the meta-circular interpreter as a component of 3-Lisp.
Uses
Reflection helps programmers make generic software libraries to display data, process different formats of data, perform serialization and deserialization of data for communication, or do bundling and unbundling of data for containers or bursts of communication. Reflective systems may provide a mirror type, used as a decoupled reflection of an object or identifier.
Effective use of reflection almost always requires a plan: A design framework, encoding description, object library, a map of a database or entity relations.
Reflection makes a language more suited to network-oriented code. For example, it assists languages such as Java to operate well in networks by enabling libraries for serialization, bundling and varying data formats. Languages without reflection such as C are required to use auxiliary compilers for tasks like Abstract Syntax Notation (ASN.1) to produce code for serialization and bundling.
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