Metaprogramming in Heron

I have posted a document explaining how Heron implements metaprogramming online at http://www.heron-language.com/metaprogramming.html. Heron is a C++ style imperative language, and the metaprogramming functionality leverages the type system more logically than C++ template metaprogramming does. I would be interested in hearing any comments, suggestions or criticisms of the design decisions. Thank you very much!

Compile-time ?

From your page:

Metaprogramming refers to the design of algorithms that are executed during compilation (compile-time) as opposed to during run-time.

I may be mistaken, but I don't believe this is a generally accepted definition for metaprogramming. In the context of C++ (and, possibly, Heron), it may be correct, but languages like Lisp can manipulate the program text at run-time.

The greek prefix 'meta' says it all: as metalanguage is the language that speaks of language, metaprogramming is programming that deals with programs as data. The specific metaprogramming operations being runtime or compile-time is a completely orthogonal issue.

The idea of Heron's metaprogramming seems interesting, though, and I'll look at it more soon.

By Andrei Formiga at Thu, 2004-09-23 17:32 | login or register to post comments

Agreed.

This is referred to as, for obvious reasons, "compile-time metaprogramming".

By Brian T Rice at Thu, 2004-09-23 18:49 | login or register to post comments

Correction made, thank you!

Thank you for the comments.

I have updated the definition to: Metaprogramming is the act of writing programs that manipulate themselves.

I don't believe that programs which output programs is a constrained enough definition of a metaprogram. For instance: is a compiler a metaprogram? A compiler doesn't usually guarantee that it will generate a real program. Is it only a metaprogram when given valid input? Is any program which outputs a valid program a meta-program?

By cdiggins at Sun, 2004-09-26 16:32 | login or register to post comments