Avoiding Confusion in Metacircularity: The Meta-Helix

A system with a metaobject protocol (MOP) allows programmers to extend it and then use the extended system as naturally as the original non-extended one. Such metaobject protocols often use a metacircular architecture to make the extensions easier to write. Unfortunately, this use of metacircularity can lead to problems stemming from a conflation of the extended and non-extended functionalities. We present a new architecture, called the meta-helix, that preserves the advantages of metacircularity but also addresses the problems with conflation.

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1996.

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