CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki2 1 MP

Metaprogramming

The process of writing code-generating programs is known as Metaprogramming [1]. These programs take in either other programs or themselves as their data and manipulate them or finish the run-time tasks at compile time itself. This provides flexibility to the developers as the new changes could be reflected without recompilation. The time it takes the programmers to write such programs is the same as it would take them to write all the code manually [2]. There are two ways that a metaprogramming works – either through the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) where the internal structure of the run-time engine is exposed to the code at the programmer’s level or through dynamic execution of programming commands that are represented as expressions. Though it is possible for a single programming language to incorporate both of these approaches, generally they provide better support for one approach than the other [1].