STRONGLY TYPED METADATA ACCESS IN OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WITH REFLECTION SUPPORT

摘要

Type safety is important property of any type system. Modern programming languages support different mechanisms to work in type safe manner, e.g., properties, methods, events, attributes (annotations) and other structures, but none of the existing, general purpose, programming languages which support reflection provide type safe type (class/structure) member metadata access. Existing solutions provide no or limited type safety which are complex and processed at runtime which by definition is not built-in type-safe metadata access, but only more or less type safe workarounds called “best practices”. Problem can be solved by introducing method for type safe type member metadata access which could be processed at compile time.