Cambridge Journals Online

Meta-programming through typeful code representation

Abstract

By allowing the programmer to write code that can generate code at run-time, meta-programming offers a powerful approach to program construction. For instance, meta-programming can often be employed to enhance program efficiency and facilitate the construction of generic programs. However, meta-programming, especially in an untyped setting, is notoriously error-prone. In this paper, we aim at making meta-programming less error-prone by providing a type system to facilitate the construction of correct meta-programs. We first introduce some code constructors for constructing typeful code representation in which program variables are represented in terms of deBruijn indexes, and then formally demonstrate how such typeful code representation can be used to support meta-programming. With our approach, a particular interesting feature is that code becomes first-class values, which can be inspected as well as executed at run-time. The main contribution of the paper lies in the recognition and then the formalization of a novel approach to typed meta-programming that is practical, general and flexible.