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Reflection definition is - an instance of reflecting; especially: the return of light or sound waves from a surface. How to use reflection in a sentence. Reflection definition, the act of reflecting, as in casting back a light or heat, mirroring, or giving back or showing an image; the state of being reflected in this way.
A bouncing of light off a surface. People see themselves in mirrors through reflection.
Synonyms Examples Word Origin. Related Words impression contemplation observation idea rumination opinion consideration meditation view picture light image echo cerebration deliberation absorption study imagination musing speculation. Contemporary Examples The sickness in her mind was a reflection of the sickness of her life, a sickness created by her family and her society. Cover-Ups and Concern Trolls: One Cake to Rule Them All: Historical Examples As it can be "no joke" to them, perhaps it should be no joke to us: Clarissa, Volume 1 of 9 Samuel Richardson.
Biography of a Slave Charles Thompson. The act of reflecting or the state of being reflected. Languages without reflection e. C have to use auxiliary compilers, e.
Reflection can be used for observing and modifying program execution at runtime. A reflection-oriented program component can monitor the execution of an enclosure of code and can modify itself according to a desired goal related to that enclosure. This is typically accomplished by dynamically assigning program code at runtime. In object-oriented programming languages such as Java , reflection allows inspection of classes, interfaces, fields and methods at runtime without knowing the names of the interfaces, fields, methods at compile time.
It also allows instantiation of new objects and invocation of methods. Reflection is also a key strategy for metaprogramming. In some object-oriented programming languages, such as C and Java , reflection can be used to override member accessibility rules. For example, reflection makes it possible to change the value of a field marked "private" in a third-party library's class.
A language supporting reflection provides a number of features available at runtime that would otherwise be difficult to accomplish in a lower-level language.
Some of these features are the abilities to:. These features can be implemented in different ways. In MOO , reflection forms a natural part of everyday programming idiom. When verbs methods are called, various variables such as verb the name of the verb being called and this the object on which the verb is called are populated to give the context of the call.
Security is typically managed by accessing the caller stack programmatically: Since callers is a list of the methods by which the current verb was eventually called, performing tests on callers [1] the command invoked by the original user allows the verb to protect itself against unauthorised use. Compiled languages rely on their runtime system to provide information about the source code. A compiled Objective-C executable, for example, records the names of all methods in a block of the executable, providing a table to correspond these with the underlying methods or selectors for these methods compiled into the program.
In a compiled language that supports runtime creation of functions, such as Common Lisp , the runtime environment must include a compiler or an interpreter. Reflection can be implemented for languages not having built-in reflection facilities by using a program transformation system to define automated source-code changes. The following code snippets create an instance foo of class Foo and invoke its method PrintHello. For each programming language , normal and reflection-based call sequences are shown. The following is an example in C:. This Delphi example assumes that a TFoo class has been declared in a unit called Unit This is a notable example, since Delphi is an unmanaged, fully natively compiled language, unlike most other languages that support reflection.
Its language architecture inherits from strongly typed Pascal, but with significant influence from Smalltalk. Compare with the other examples here, many of which are dynamic or script languages like Perl, Python or PHP, or languages with a runtime like Java or C.
The following is an example in eC:. The following is an example in Go:.
The following is an example in Java:. The following is an example in Perl:.
The following is an example in Python:. The following is an example in R:. The following is an example in Ruby:. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Programming paradigms Action Agent-oriented Array-oriented Automata-based Concurrent computing Relativistic programming Data-driven Declarative contrast: