Editing Reflective programming (section)

==Historical background==
The earliest computers were programmed in their native [[assembly language]]s, which were inherently reflective, as these original architectures could be programmed by defining instructions as data and using [[self-modifying code]]. As the bulk of programming moved to higher-level [[compiled languages]] such as [[ALGOL]], [[COBOL]], [[Fortran]], [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]], and [[C (programming language)|C]], this reflective ability largely disappeared until new programming languages with reflection built into their type systems appeared.{{Citation needed|date=July 2015}}

[[Brian Cantwell Smith]]'s 1982 doctoral dissertation introduced the notion of computational reflection in procedural [[programming languages]] and the notion of the [[meta-circular interpreter]] as a component of [[3-Lisp]].<ref>Brian Cantwell Smith, [http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/15961 Procedural Reflection in Programming Languages], Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD dissertation, 1982.</ref><ref>Brian C. Smith. [http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/specpub.php?id=840 Reflection and semantics in a procedural language] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151213034343/http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/specpub.php?id=840 |date=2015-12-13 }}. Technical Report MIT-LCS-TR-272, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 1982.</ref>