Need reflection facilities

[Bradley Smith]

Dave Woldrich wrote:
> == Quote from Georg Wrede (georg at nospam.org)'s article
>> Dave Woldrich wrote:
>>> If I had reflection in a systems-programming language like D, the tools that could
>>> be written to work with D would be incredible.
>> You might want to elaborate a little, maybe Walter is reading. ;-)
> 
> You know, I made that comment sortof as a stream-of-consciousness aside.  But your
> suggestion made me think a little harder about it, because the kind of type
> information that Eclipse builds for languages like Java would require quite a
> trick to pull off in D.
> 
> Basically, Eclipse knows about every symbol and every class as you develop as you
> type them (in Java).  It can do symbol typeahead suggestions, realtime reporting
> of syntax and missing symbol errors, automatic suggestions for error quick fixes,
> etc.  It has panels that can show you complete type hierarchies of anything in the
> workspace, and these hierarchies will rearrange themselves in realtime as you make
> changes to the classes they are displaying.  It has refactorings where you can
> push down and pull up classes, rename symbols globally, etc.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that Eclipse implements these 
features with direct editing of the code symbol tree and automatic 
incremental compilation, not from reflection. Java reflection is a 
runtime feature.

Regardless, I am in favor of some kind of reflection. Personally, I 
think reasonable means of accomplishing it would be through optional 
addition of compile-time information which when coupled with a library 
would allow for dynamic runtime features.

   Bradley