Meta-programming

The first part of the paper gives a brief overview of meta-programming, in particular program generation, and its use in software development. The second part introduces a basic calculus, related to FreshML, that supports program generation (as described through examples and a translation of MetaML into it) and programming in-the-large (this is demonstrated by a translation of CMS into it).

We define a basic calculus for name management, which is obtained by an appropriate combination of three ingredients: extensible records (in a simplified form), names (as in FreshML), computational types (to allow computational effects, including generation of fresh names). The calculus supports the use of symbolic names for programming in-the-large, e.g. it subsumes Ancona and Zucca's calculus for module systems, and for meta-programming (but not the intensional analysis of object level terms supported by FreshML), e.g. it subsumes (and improves) Nanevski and Pfenning's calculus for meta-programming with names and necessity. Moreover, it models some aspects of Java's class loaders.