Re: What's the word for...

> Could someone please tell me what the word is for a language
> which can be written in itself?


I don't know if this is you're looking for, but there's the notion of a
reflective language. A reflective language is a language which incorporates
structures represting itself ( introspection ). It's possible to examine or
modify thoses structures. Then, it's possible to examine or modify the
semantics of suchs languages.


There's several examples of implementations of reflective languages (3-Lisp
and to a certain point Smalltalk ). Here's some references if you want to
know more about reflective languages.




@article{,
                author = {P. Maes},
                title = {{Concepts and Experiments in Computational Reflection}},
                journal = {Proceedings of OOPSLA'87, ACM Sigplan Notices},
                volume = 22,
                number = 12,
                month = {December},
                year = 1987,
                pages = {147--155}
                }


@article{,
                author = {Cointe, P.},
                title = {{Metaclasses are First Class: the ObjVLisp Model}},
                journal = {Proceedings of OOPSLA'87, ACM Sigplan Notices},
                volume = 22,
                number = 12,
                month = {December},
                year = 1987,
                pages = {156--167}
                }


@inproceedings{,
author = {J. des Rivi\`eres and B. C. Smith},
title = {{The implementation of procedurally reflective
languages}},
booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on
Lisp and Functional Programming}},
month = {August},
year = 1984,
pages = {331--347}
}


@proceedings{
key = {WRMA91},
                title = {{Informal Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Reflection
                                            and Metalevel Architectures in Object-Oriented
                                            Programming, OOPSLA'91}},
                booktitle = {{Informal Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Reflection
                                            and Metalevel Architectures in Object-Oriented
                                            Programming, OOPSLA'91}},
                annote = {Distributed to the workshop participants},
                month = {October},
                year = 1991
                }


@proceedings{,
key = {WRMA90},
title = {{Informal Proceedings of the First Workshop on Reflection
and Metalevel Architectures in Object-Oriented
Programming, OOPSLA/ECOOP'90}},
booktitle = {{Informal Proceedings of the First Workshop on Reflection
and Metalevel Architectures in Object-Oriented
Programming, OOPSLA/ECOOP'90}},
annote = {Distributed to the workshop participants},
month = {October},
year = 1990
}


I'll hope this help.


Marco
--

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