Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:11373 comp.arch:5540 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!sean From: sean@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Sean Matthews) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.arch Subject: Re: Self-modifying code Keywords: self-modifying code, generate-and-execute Message-ID: <524@etive.ed.ac.uk> Date: 16 Jul 88 10:08:02 GMT References: <3353@cognos.UUCP> <619@goofy.megatest.UUCP> <429@uwovax.uwo.ca> <12360@ut-sally.UUCP> <8518@pur-ee.UUCP> Sender: news@etive.ed.ac.uk Reply-To: sean@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Sean Matthews) Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U Lines: 34 With this talk about self modifying code, no one has mentioned the theoretical work that has been done on the subject. There is a quite well known paper (and quite controversial) on the subject of programs that can modify themselves and their interpreters by Brian Smith Reflection and Semantics in a procedural language MIT-LCS-TR-272 Mass. Inst. Tech. January 1982 Reflection and semantics in Lisp 11th ACM symposium on principles of programming languages Then there is the reply to these papers by Mitchel Wand and Daniel Freidman The mystery of the tower revealed: a non-reflective description of the reflective tower CACM 1986 (this is as far as I can go since I have a copy of a copy and there is no publishing information on it) An extended version of this paper was published in Meta-level architectures and reflection, P. Maes and D. Nardi (editors) Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland) 1988 There is a lot of theory about self modifying systems and self referential systems but by the time you start looking into it you are in philosophical logic, not comp.architecture Se\'an Matthews arpa: sean%uk.ac.ed.aipna@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk