Chapter 9. Languages and tools
This chapter covers
- An introduction to languages that contain native metaprogramming constructs
- An overview of tools that provide dynamic programming facilities for C#
Throughout this book, you’ve seen C# used (and potentially abused!) to facilitate metaprogramming. In some cases, external components (like NRefactory and Cecil) were used because they provided functionality necessary to support metaprogramming. Although C# is a powerful programming language that you can use to create concise, flexible programs, at times in this book C# may have felt twisted and bent to service metaprogramming needs.
This isn’t too surprising, because you could argue that C# wasn’t designed with metaprogramming as a deep, core aspect. But programming languages have been created that allow you to modify the language as it executes. These languages, created after the initial 1.0 release of .NET, have metaprogramming facilities built in. Furthermore, tools have been created for .NET languages to allow you to handle concepts such as code injection and aspect-oriented programming (AOP). This chapter introduces you to languages that make metaprogramming straightforward and easy to use, and to tools that lower the barrier of dynamic programming in C#.
Let’s start by looking at a couple of different metaprogramming-based languages that target the CLR.