Christoph Steindl

Benefits of a data flow-aware programming environment

Many programmers write their programs with a primitive text editor that has no knowledge about the edited text. On the other hand, they use ingenious compilers that collect control flow and data flow information to perform optimizations and generate optimized code. We argue that program editors should have the same knowledge about the control flow and data flow of a program. Such editors could help programmers to better understand programs and to be more productive. We propose a data flow-aware programming environment that makes the information that the compiler already computed visible. The bidirectional feedback from the compiler to the programmer and back from the programmer to the compiler enables productive programming and faster debugging.

The Oberon-2 Reflection Model and Its Applications

We describe the reflection model of Oberon-2, a language in the tradition of Pascal and Modula-2. It provides run-time information about the structure of variables, types and procedures and allows the programmer to manipulate the values of variables. The special aspect of the Oberon-2 reflection model is that metainformation is not obtained via metaclasses. It is rather organized as structured sequences of elements stored on a disk, which can be enumerated by an iterator. This results in a simple and uniform access mechanism and keeps the memory overhead to a minimum. We also show a number of challenging applications that have been implemented with this reflection model.

Reflection in Oberon

We introduce metaprogramming facilities into the Oberon V4 system. Metaprogramming means that a module can access the structure of other modules (i.e., procedures, types, run-time data) at run time. We discuss how type safety can be enforced in an environment with strong typing. Finally we show how metaprogramming can be used to implement an easy-to-use database interface and conclude with a comparison with other metaprogramming systems for statically-typed programming languages.