Introspection is the ability of a program to discover and use its own structure. Reflection is the ability of a program to use introspection to examine and modify the structure and behavior of the program at runtime. You can use reflection to dynamically create an instance of a type or get the type from an existing object and invoke its methods or access its fields and properties. This makes your code more dynamic and can be written against known interfaces so that the actual classes can be instantiated using reflection. Another purpose of reflection is to create development and debugging tools, and it is also used for meta-programming.
There are two different approaches to implementing reflection:
The first approach is that the information about reflection is tightly integrated with the language and exists as part of the program's structure. Access to program-based reflection is available by a property or method.
The second approach is based on the separation of reflection information...