Metaobject

In computer science, a metaobject is an object that manipulates, creates, describes, or implements other objects (including itself). The object that the metaobject is about is called the base object. Some information that a metaobject might store is the base object's type, interface, class, methods, attributes, parse tree, etc. Metaobjects are examples of the computer science concept of reflection, where a system has access (usually at run time) to its internal structure. Reflection enables a system to essentially rewrite itself on the fly, to change the actual structure of the system as it executes.