A Suite of Metaprogramming Techniques

Abstract

Metaprogramming may be done with just a few programming techniques: an object-program representation (to capture the syntactical structure of object programs), pattern matching or accessors (to take apart object programs or to select suitable parts thereof), pattern building or constructors (to construct or compose object programs), and a computational model for tree walking (e.g., visitors in OO programming or possibly just recursion). In this chapter, we describe some metaprogramming techniques on the basis of which many metaprograms can be written in a more disciplined style. That is, we describe term rewriting, attribute grammars, multi-stage programming, partial evaluation, and abstract interpretation.