. We provide a very simple model of a reflective facility based on the pure -calculus, and we show that its theory of contextual equivalence is trivial: two terms in the language are contextually equivalent iff they are ff-congruent. 1. Introduction The thesis of much of programming language semantics is that the fundamental question about a programming language is its notion of contextual equivalence: which pairs of phrases (M; N) have the property that M and N may be freely substituted for each other in any program context, without changing the behavior of the resulting program [10, 14]. This is a key notion because, for example, any source-to-source optimization in a compiler (except possibly for a whole-program transformation) should produce a term contextually equivalent to the original. In this note, we provide a very simple model of a reflective facility based on the pure -calculus, and we show that its theory of contextual equivalence is trivial: two terms in the language ar...