Not since the advent of the integrated development environment has a development tool had the impact on programmer productivity that refactoring tools have had for objectoriented developers. However, at the present time, such tools do not exist for high-performance languages such as C and Fortran; moreover, refactorings specific to highperformance and parallel computing have not yet been adequately examined. We observe that many common refactorings for object-oriented systems have clear analogs in procedural Fortran. The Fortran language itself and the introduction of object orientation in Fortran 2003 give rise to several additional refactorings. Moreover, we conjecture that many hand optimizations common in supercomputer programming can be automated by a refactoring engine but deferred until build time in order to preserve the maintainability of the original code base. Finally, we introduce Photran, an integrated development environment that will be used to implement these transformations, and discuss the impact of such a tool on legacy code reengineering.
Computational reflection makes it easy to solve problems that are otherwise difficult to address in Smalltalk-80, such as the construction of monitors, distributed objects, and futures, and can allow experimentation with new inheritance, delegation, and protection schemes. Full reflection is expensive to implement. However, the ability to override method lookup can bring much of the power of reflection to languages like Smalltalk-80 at no cost in efficiency.
Computational reflection makes it easy to solve problems that are otherwise difficult to address in Smalltalk-80, such as the construction of monitors, distributed objects, and futures, and can allow experimentation with new inheritance, delegation, and protection schemes. FulI reflection is expensive to implement. However, the ability to override method lookup can bring much of the power of reflection to languages like Smalltalk-at IXJ cost in efficiency.
Abstract. Smalltalk-80 is a pure object-oriented language in which messages are dispatched according to the class of the receiver, or first argument, of a message. Object-oriented languages that support multimethods dispatch messages using all their arguments. While Smalltalk does not support multimethods, Smalltalk's reflective facilities allow programmers to efficiently add them to the language. This paper explores several ways in which this can be done, and the relative efficiency of each. Moreover, this paper can be seen as a lens through which the design issues raised by multimethods, as well as by using metaobjects to build them, can be more closely examined.
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