Self-modifying code

[Sean Matthews]

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 at nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk