C-language Reflectance for S

Short Description
C-language Reflectance for S. Duncan Temple Lang. June 5, 2001. Abstract … Obviously we cannot add the reflectance information to the existing C language. …

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Content
C-language Reflectance for S
Duncan Temple Lang
June 5, 2001
Abstract
We describe a mechanism for generating information about C code. This can be used by environments such as S,
Java, Perl, Python, etc. to dynamically provide access to arbitrary C code from those languages. This is similar to
the concepts of reflectance in Java and other languages. Rather than providing this meta-information directly in the
language as Java, Python, etc. do, we provide a tool based on lcc[1]
1 Introduction
Reflectance is a very powerful paradigm in computing. Reflectance allows software to dynamically query other software
for its definition, or more generally the publically available accessors that software provides to users and other
software. This allows applications to discover and use capabilities of software it about which it was not given explicit
information when it itself was created. This is much the same way that we can dynamically load C/C++ or Fortran
code into S and immediately be able to invoke the routines in those libraries. Reflectance is more than this however. It
allows an application (e.g. S) to find out more about the routines that simply whether they are present or not….