Strongly typed metadata access in object oriented programming languages with reflection support

A method executed by a processor for a type safe type member, of a class, metadata access in statically typed general purpose programming languages (hereafter referred to as programming languages) which support reflection where the method comprising:

• invoking, in a source code of a programming language of the programming languages, a new programming method that is not part of the programming languages, through the usage of overloading of an operator of the programming language, such as ‘memberof’, and an input;
• where the invoked new programming method:
• receives, as the input, a member access express or a member invocation expression (hereafter both referred to as a member expression) of the member;
• retrieves, member metadata of the member, using the input member expression without having ownership of an instantiated instance of the class of the member and without performing the corresponding member access or the corresponding member invocation operation of the member expression;
• wherein the member metadata comprising:
• name of the member and type of the member;
• creates a generic version of a metadata instance of the retrieved member metadata, where the generic version of the metadata instance contains, in addition to the retrieved member metadata, a generic parameter, which is a generic type that can be used in type checking at compile time to improve type safety;
• sets the generic parameter of the generic version of the metadata to be type of the member used in the member expression;
• and
• outputs the generic version of the metadata instance as a result;
• processing the result of the new programming method by a compiler during a compilation of the source code, to perform the type checking at compile time to improve type safety of the source code;
• and
• creating the generic version of the metadata instance as the result of the new programming method at runtime during the execution of the new programming method.