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Small extensions for the core Java language libraries.

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/*
 * Copyright 2016 Yetamine
 *
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */

package net.yetamine.lang.introspective;

import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.Map;

/**
 * Indicates support for retrieving additional information of an instance to aid
 * debugging, logging and other kinds of introspective processing.
 */
public interface Introspection {

    /**
     * Provides the set of elements describing features or capabilities of this
     * instance.
     *
     * 
     * The default implementation returns an empty map. Implementations are
     * supposed to override this method and provide actual values. The result
     * must be thread-safe and it may be immutable.
     *
     * @return the introspective description; never {@code null}, but possibly
     *         unmodifiable
     */
    default Map introspect() {
        return Collections.emptyMap();
    }
}