Re: Introspector Project Launch at SourceForge

[michael dupont <mdupont777 at yahoo dot com>]

Joern,

The idea of reflection, introspection in programs are
ideas explored in
lisp, smalltalk, objective-c, java and also by
projects such as OpenC++ [Chiba95]. (see the list at
the end of the email)

The interfaces supported by java for reflection have
been ported to the gnu classpath project, and
such an interface is one of the interfaces that are
influencing the design.

IBM also supported a Interface to thier compiler with
a database, They also have SOM, and Microsoft has COM.

> Let me get this straight: you want to make gcc
> self-aware?
> And a philospher as well as a programmer?

The idea is not to make the compiler be the
programmer, but support the programmer,
to reduce the accidental costs in programming.

The programmer should be the philosopher, 
I do read about eastern and western philosophy and
religion, 
Douglas Hofstadter gives a good overview of the gödel
number and self referencial programs in "gödel escher
bach".
One idea of the buddist mindfullness meditation is to
be aware of current state of your mind.

How many of you wish to have a catalog of
data-structures in your program that you can
programmatically 
query and create dynamic code with?  
Now how many of you have that with a non-free
software?
I have been collecting references to projects of
relevance interest, and
you can find the in the task list of the introspector
project.
The SNIFF toolkit supports an API that allows many of
these operations that are needed,
but it is not GPLed. 

How many times have you had to turn away interested
students and researchers, or told them to read tree.h?
I have read it, and the work is based on what I have
learned.

How many researchers are using c-front to do these
things when they could be using the gcc? Many.

Here are some papers that describe some interesting
papers in this area, and there is much interest
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/chiba95metaobject.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ishikawa96design.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/murphy95software.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/griswold96programming.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/chiba00loadtime.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ledoux99opencorba.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/holder97reflective.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/313757.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/37617.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/284479.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/331827.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/396561.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/282958.html
I have been collecting references to projects of
relevance interest, and
you can find the in the task list of the introspector
project.

> I think the optimum announcement day for such a
> project is the
> start of the second quarter

I have been working on this for the past year and a
half, and the accouncement is to call for support.
If anyone is interested, we can start producing a
proper tested and intergrated release in that quarter.

Mike

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