Historical Background
The earliest computers were programmed in their native assembly language, which were inherently reflective as these original architectures could be programmed by defining instructions as data and using self-modifying code. As programming moved to higher level languages such as C, this reflective ability disappeared (outside of malware) until programming languages with reflection built in to their type systems appeared.
Brian Cantwell Smith's 1982 doctoral dissertation introduced the notion of computational reflection in programming languages, and the notion of the meta-circular interpreter as a component of 3-Lisp.
Read more about this topic: Reflection (computer Programming)
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