Controlling Aspect Reentrancy

: Aspect languages provide different mechanisms to control when an aspect should apply based on properties of the execution context. They however fail to explicitly identify and cleanly capture a property as basic as that of reentrancy. As a result, aspect developers have to resort to low-level and complex pointcut descriptions that are error prone and hamper the understandability of aspect definitions. We analyze the issue of aspect reentrancy, illustrate how current languages fail to properly support it, and define a new linguistic construct to control aspect reentrancy. Considering aspect reentrancy from the start in the design of an aspect language simplifies the task of rogrammers by raising the level of abstraction of aspect definitions. Key Words: Aspect-oriented programming, pointcut language, aspect reentrancy

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JUCS
• Authors: Éric Tanter
• Keywords: Complex Pointcut Descriptions, Error Prone, Execution Context, JUCS 2008