Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection

This book for the first time collects an important part of the research on reflective systems, providing both an introduction to the topic and a reference to research in the field. It contains a selection of the papers presented at the Workshop held in Alghero, Italy, during October 1986, the goal being to bring together researchers in order to discuss the problems arising in the definition and the construction of reflective systems, and to investigate their practical application.

The papers in the first part shed some light on the concept of reflection or its origins. Important questions treated in these papers are: What are the issues in computational reflection? How does it relate to the notion of reflection in logic and meta-mathematics? How can reflective systems be categorized? Why is meaning an important issue in reflection and reflection an interesting domain to study meaning?

A number of practical realisations of reflective systems are presented in the second part. The papers investigate the problems arising in the construction of reflective systems, and present techniques to solve these. The implementations discussed range from specific systems exhibiting a reflective behaviour e.g. logic-based reasoning systems, rule-based systems, etc., to programming languages providing facilities for the construction of reflective systems (logic programming languages, description-based languages, functional languages, object-oriented and actor languages).

Finally, various applications of meta-level architectures and reflection are described.