A computer-implemented method of processing a module specification to produce predicator definitions is disclosed. The predicator definitions provide a facility for type-safe processing of generic elements (typically from markup processing or synthetic-language parsing) to specific elements suitable for accumulation as member data in an application-specific data structure. The method processes representations of modules, classes, and members. The predicators provided include a predicator base class definition, a plurality of predicator specializations, a promissary reference base class definition, and a plurality of promissary reference class definitions.