Computational Reflection in Maastricht

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

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Here is a message I received from a student in Maastricht...

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

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Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 12:34:49 +0100
From: RBT.Marcus@STUDENT.UNIMAAS.NL
Subject: master's thesis on computational reflection
To: fare@tunes.org
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Hello Fare,

First, I would like to express my appreciations for the work you have done
on reflection. I have studied your paper "Meta-programming and Free
Availability of Sources" and found it to be very informative.

I wanted to let you know, that as a student of the Universiteit Maastricht,
The Netherlands, I am, guided by Peter Braspenning, working on my master's
thesis about (procedural) computational reflection. As fascinating as the
subject is, its conceptual complexity can be a burden for people to
participate or explore the subject. This definitely corresponds to my
personal experience. I would like to write a master's thesis in which I
discuss basic aspects of reflection (both practical and theoretical) and
present an overview of reflective systems or reflective architectures
available today. I have been studying Smith's 3-LISP, Craig's ELEKTRA,
Pitrat's MACISTE and more, and would like to write a comprehensible
introduction to computational reflection. The emphasis however will be on
procedural computational reflection.

As soon as parts of my thesis are available, I will publish them at my
webpage (http://reflection.crs.unimaas.nl) hoping to get feedback from other
people. For now, I would like to let you know, that after translating 3-Lisp
from MacLisp to Common Lisp and debugging it for weeks (!), I finally have
it up and running. Although I cannot completely guarantee the correct
translation yet (due to my basic experience in Lisp), it has served me well
in understanding the architecture. All systems running on my Linux machine
are made available on this website. A telnet applet allows you to try the
system yourself. I kindly invite you to have a look.

Any comments or ideas concerning my project are appreciated. Would you be
willing to provide some feedback on my thesis in a later stage?

Kind regards,

Ranco Marcus
http://www.crs.unimaas.nl

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