A Reflective Language

RIVARD, Fred. Smalltalk: A Reflective Language. In: Proceedings of REFLECTION. 1996. S. 21-38. pdf

> Classes as regular objects are described by other (regular) classes called Metaclasses. A metaclass has a single instance (except metaclasses involved in the kernel of Smalltalk). It establishes a couple class/metaclass schema. Inheritance on metaclasses follows the one at the class level (cf Figure 1), defining the Smalltalk metaclass composition rule.