A Survey of Metaprogramming Languages

Abstract

Metaprogramming is the process of writing computer programs that treat programs as data, enabling them to analyze or transform existing programs or generate new ones. While the concept of metaprogramming has existed for several decades, activities focusing on metaprogramming have been increasing rapidly over the past few years, with most languages offering some metaprogramming support and the amount of metacode being developed growing exponentially. In this article, we introduce a taxonomy of metaprogramming languages and present a survey of metaprogramming languages and systems based on the taxonomy. Our classification is based on the metaprogramming model adopted by the language, the phase of the metaprogram evaluation, the metaprogram source location, and the relation between the metalanguage and the object language.