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Reflection is often used as part of software testing, such as for the runtime creation/instantiation of mock objects. Reflection is also a key strategy for metaprogramming. In some object-oriented programming languages such as C# and Java, reflection can be used to bypass member accessibility rules. For C#-properties this can be achieved by ...
Attributes are accessible to both the compiler and programmatically through reflection. In contrast, properties, in C# terminology, are members of a class which syntactically are used like instance (or class) variables, but are implemented as a pair of getter/setter functions. (In the absence of a setter, properties are read-only.)
Programming languages and computing platforms that typically support reflective programming (reflection) include dynamically typed languages such as Smalltalk, Perl, PHP, Python, VBScript, and JavaScript. Also the .NET languages are supported and the Maude system of rewriting logic.
C# supports classes with properties. The properties can be simple accessor functions with a backing field, or implement arbitrary getter and setter functions. A property is read-only if there's no setter. Like with fields, there can be class and instance properties. The underlying methods can be virtual or abstract like any other method. [82]
The java.lang.Class [2] class is the basis of more advanced introspection. For instance, if it is desirable to determine the actual class of an object (rather than whether it is a member of a particular class), Object.getClass() and Class.getName() can be used:
C# has a static class syntax (not to be confused with static inner classes in Java), which restricts a class to only contain static methods. C# 3.0 introduces extension methods to allow users to statically add a method to a type (e.g., allowing foo.bar() where bar() can be an imported extension method working on the type of foo ).
This example uses a String as the state, which is an immutable object in Java. In real-life scenarios the state will almost always be a mutable object, in which case a copy of the state must be made. It must be said that the implementation shown has a drawback: it declares an internal class.
Haxe is a general-purpose programming language supporting object-oriented programming, generic programming, and various functional programming constructs. Features such as iterations, exceptions, and reflective programming (code reflection) are also built-in functions of the language and libraries.