Reasoning-conscious Meta-object Design of a Reflective Concurrent Language

Computational reflection gives programming languages high flexibility, which is useful for parallel/distributed programming. On the other hand, its interpreter based execution model makes efficient implementation difficult. Especially, meta-objects in concurrent languages are described with explicit state transition, which makes program reasoning---such as partial evaluation---difficult. In this paper, we propose a new meta-object design, which exploits reader/writer methods in our concurrent object-oriented language Schematic. The crux of the design is separation of state-related operations from others, which allows us to optimize meta-objects using an existing partial evaluator because the most methods in the meta-objects can be regarded as a sequential program. 1 Introduction 1.1 Reflection in Parallel/Distributed Programs Practical parallel and distributed programs often have complicated computation and communication structures for achieving efficiency, fault-tolerance, portabil..