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:::The point is that ''the C programming language'' has no support for reflection. Of course the environment is very likely to provide some form of metadata discovery if you go low-level -- it would be hard ''not'' to. (For one thing, almost any environment will allow a program to inspect its own executable, even if it has to do all the gruntwork itself.) But calling this "reflection" is missing the point entirely -- namely, that such features are only relevant to the discussion if they're part of the language proper. dlsym() cannot be called part of the language proper, not even if we constrain ourselves to the particular dialect of C as implemented by the GNU Compiler Collection.
:::If you want to call this "a weak form of reflection provided by the environment", then sure, go ahead, but calling this reflection does not change the fact that ''C'' is not a reflective language, so Behdad's statement is at best misleading, and your dismissal of native reflection as "hooks and syntax" reminds me of the old adage that "you can write FORTRAN in any language". The same is doubtlessly true for getting reflection, as long as you're willing to put in all the extra work yourself. But you're getting dangerously close to just reasserting the basics of the [[von Neumann architecture]]. [[Special:Contributions/82.95.254.249|82.95.254.249]] ([[User talk:82.95.254.249|talk]]) 01:41, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
:::: There is no such thing as GNU C language, there is a GNU C compiler only. And I think that it's not useful anyways to add information about a non-standard non-portable way of doing reflection in C. Of course it can be done. In a non portable way it can be done with each compiler that has debug symbols. It's even easy, there's nothing magic in GNU C. But how does this add to the concept and understanding of the reflection concept? If you explain the concept clearly, then of course a C programmer know that he can implement it in C. It's something that should not enter in the main article IMHO. -AngeloPesce
== Paradigm ==
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